Author: Anthony Towns 2021-03-06 11:33:26
Published on: 2021-03-06T11:33:26+00:00
In an email thread discussing the implementation of Taproot, Anthony Towns and Matt Corallo discussed their differing opinions on user-activated forks. The two interpretations are either to force a chain split when Bitcoin is at risk of being destroyed or to remove miners’ influence over consensus rules entirely. Corallo thinks that bip8's optional lockinontimeout setting and must-signal approach is well-designed for the former because if miners object for good reasons, then there is no need to override them while still having the possibility to override them if they object for bad reasons. However, there is much more significant support for case 2 than expected. On the other hand, Towns believes that bip8 is not suitable for that approach and encourages a consensus split in the event that good reasons for not activating are discovered afterward because lockinontimeout=false nodes remain able to abandon the activation attempt. He suggests that David Harding’s “speedy trial” approach probably doesn’t suffer from these problems and is the right course of action. If people want a "taproot is guaranteed to activate no later than X" PR merged, someone needs to do a lot more outreach to be sure that that's the right outcome, and it's not just devs/maintainers making the call.Towns prefers the speedy trial with signaling first, and if that fails, then either go back to the drawing board to fix the real problems with taproot or switch to a straight flag day activation as Matt proposes. They will have established broad community consensus for activation if no objections are discovered during the speedy trial.
Updated on: 2023-05-21T01:22:35.292090+00:00