Trinary Version Signaling for softfork upgrades

Summary:

The context provided is a thread of emails in the bitcoin-dev mailing list regarding a proposal for a new feature in the Bitcoin repository. The original email was sent by someone named BT, who proposed the addition of a new feature to the repo itself. The details of the proposal are not mentioned in the context. The subsequent replies are from other members of the mailing list discussing the proposal and providing their opinions. There are two separate instances of the mailing list being linked, one at the end of the original email and one in a subsequent reply. It is not clear if these links are meant to provide more information about the proposal or if they are simply included as part of the standard email signature.One of the proposals discussed was for soft fork upgrades and suggested using trinary version signaling instead of binary signaling to release non-contentious upgrades quicker and prevent undesirable forks. The three signaling states are: actively supporting the change, actively opposing the change, or not signaling (default state). This allows lazy miners who oppose the change to update their software and signal opposition while still allowing them to remain lazy without slowing down soft fork activation much.Contentious upgrades require a higher threshold of support signaling when there is more active opposition signaling. The proposal aims to prevent chain splits during upgrades, including permanent failure of an upgrade due to large miner opposition. The goal is to estimate what fraction of users want which rules, which can be difficult to do accurately.The existing mechanisms for estimating user sentiment are community discussion, social consensus estimation, and miner signaling during deployment period. However, these mechanisms are rough estimates of user sentiment, so multiple barriers are needed for an upgrade with higher thresholds of success. Ultimately, getting majority hash power support is necessary for successful activation.

Updated on: 2023-06-14T23:33:37.702232+00:00