Trinary Version Signaling for softfork upgrades

Summary:

The bitcoin community is currently divided over whether or not to split the network due to disagreements on protocol upgrades. Luke Dashjr argues that a split is necessary for bitcoin to continue as a decentralized currency and suggests that a clean and well-defined split would minimize the risk of ongoing disagreement after an attempted protocol change. On the other hand, Eric Voskuil emphasizes the importance of majority hash power support in preventing a split and suggests that anyone can split off from a chain by changing a rule at any time. The debate mainly focuses on how to estimate what fraction of users want which rules, but it has proven difficult to do so accurately.Both miners and merchants play important roles in the functioning of the bitcoin network. While some argue that miners control confirmation and others argue that users decide the rules, it is clear that both parties are significant contributors. Pieter Wuille, a bitcoin developer, Bitcoin Taproot creator, and co-founder of Blockstream, has proposed a new mechanism for soft fork upgrades. The proposal involves using trinary version signaling instead of binary signaling, allowing for three signaling states: actively supporting the change, actively opposing the change, or not signaling (neither supporting nor opposing). This approach enables quicker releases with a lower percentage of miners signaling support for non-contentious upgrades. For contentious upgrades, miners who oppose the change are incentivized to update their software to signal opposition, and the higher the opposition, the higher the threshold required to lock in the upgrade. The proposal attempts to solve issues with both BIP9 / BIP8 LOT=false and LOT=true proponents and features a chart that shows how much support signaling would be necessary given a particular amount of active opposition signaling.Wuille believes that this is the right time to discuss new soft fork upgrade mechanisms when there are no pressing soft fork upgrades ready to deploy.

Updated on: 2023-06-14T23:36:20.658373+00:00