Moving towards user activated soft fork activation

Summary:

The state of centralization in Bitcoin is a concern, regardless of one's opinion on the merits of different forks. Negotiating a change to any rule with 75% of the economy and/or 90% of the hash power makes Bitcoin purely political money. This can be done by "they" as well. While politics play a big role in this, broader decentralization would be better. Miner activated soft forks and user activated soft forks do not need discussions with centralized parties to move forward. These are merely two different methods for pushing a soft fork through the network. The key is that it's a soft fork and old nodes continue to work as always, whether the soft fork deploys or not.User activated soft forks, also known as 'economically forced soft forks,' are useful if miners are in clear opposition to the broader economy. They only work if the broader economy actually supports the soft fork, which is much more difficult to measure than miner support. Miners with deeper pockets may resist for some time, effectively performing a rewardless 51% attack and maintaining a split network for some time. If the split is not instantly successful, there would be a lot of damage to old nodes, although there would also be a lot of damage to the miners. In some sense, playing chicken with the miners is involved.Nick ODell thinks that the UASF is a good idea because hashrate follows coin price. If the UASF has the higher coin price, the other chain will be annihilated. If the UASF has a lower coin price, the user activated chain can still exist (though their coins can be trivially stolen on the majority chain). Alice and Bob both have a stake in one fork or the other succeeding if there are two forks of Blahcoin. However, this is not relevant to a UASF. The existing nodes on the network have a single formal definition for longest chain. If the UASF is successful, there will be only one chain and no coin split or network fork.

Updated on: 2023-06-11T21:54:49.909425+00:00