Author: Billy Tetrud 2021-06-30 02:02:36
Published on: 2021-06-30T02:02:36+00:00
In a recent discussion about avoiding chain splits, Jorge and Luke held different opinions regarding the issue. While Jorge believed that splitting should not be avoided even when possible, Luke argued that accepting a split between disagreeing users is the only way Bitcoin can continue as a decentralized currency. Eric Voskuil joined the conversation and highlighted the importance of miners controlling confirmation in Bitcoin. He argued that the largest investment in mining determines censorship resistance, and users decide what software to run, but money requires others to agree on the same rules.The group acknowledged that some people want rule changes but are not willing to follow a minority fork. There were also concerns about an increased orphan rate and reorg rate, as well as the accuracy of measuring the economic majority's preferences. The discussion touched on issues of timing and coordination, with Luke noting that contentious changes need more time for discussion and preparation. The conversation ended with Luke proposing a mechanism to prevent undesired chain splits during upgrades. This led to the proposal of a trinary version signaling system for soft fork upgrades in response to the recent controversy over upgrade mechanisms for the non-controversial taproot upgrade. The proposed signaling system allows for three signaling states: actively support the change, actively oppose the change, or not signaling (neither support nor oppose). This enables quicker release of non-contentious upgrades with a lower percentage of miners signaling support.For contentious upgrades, miners who oppose the change are incentivized to update their software to a version that can actively signal opposition to the change. The more opposition there is, the higher the threshold necessary to lock in the upgrade. Developers and miners have an incentive to keep the Bitcoin system healthy and measure the consensus of the Bitcoin community, but measuring the consensus can be extraordinarily difficult.Soft forks are rule changes and thereby incompatible unless enforced by majority hash power. Ultimately, majority hash power support is the only way to prevent a split. Activation without majority hash power enforcement does not ensure prevention of a split. Anyone can split off from a chain by changing a rule at any time, so activation without hash power enforcement can lead to inaccurate estimates of user sentiment. Multiple barriers need to be in place for an upgrade, and higher thresholds of success are required to require larger supermajorities in both consensus and miner signaling.
Updated on: 2023-06-14T23:35:05.368510+00:00