Published on: 2021-03-01T14:33:33+00:00
Bitcoin developer Luke Dashjr has expressed concerns about the potential chaos that could arise from non-signalled activation. He warns that anti-soft-fork and pro-SF nodes may end up on the same chain, following conflicting perceptions of the rules. This could result in a strong incentive not to rely on the rules if a resolution is not found.The author of the article discusses the potential risks and downsides of implementing soft forks in cryptocurrency. For instance, allowing miners to steal user funds goes against new rules, and enforcing new rules can lead to hard-fork events and the need for new software. To mitigate these risks, the author suggests delaying activation until all objections are resolved or committing to activation on-chain based on specific criteria.The author also provides examples of past controversial soft forks, including halting segwit deployment due to covert ASICBoost which could have prevented a hard forked chain split. However, the existing plan was followed, and BCH resulted.The author notes that small numbers of advocates running code to enforce a flag day could lead to failure, and that controversy may prevent adoption of certain soft forks. As a solution, the author suggests supporting "user-prohibited soft-forks" in a similar way to "user-activated soft-forks," moving action to whether users are required/prohibited from signaling.On February 27, 2021, Luke Dashjr, via bitcoin-dev expressed concern over the activation of softforks lacking signalling. According to him, this creates ambiguity as it is unclear if the softfork has been activated at all. However, he suggested that the ambiguity can be resolved by seeing one block in the heaviest valid chain.Gregorio Guidi proposed a new activation mechanism for soft forks called "decreasing threshold activation". This approach aims to overcome the limitations of the LOT=true/false dichotomy. It operates similarly to BIP8 but with a gradually reduced threshold that triggers the STARTED -> LOCKED_IN transition on each period in steps of 24 blocks (~1.2%). This approach is relatively conservative at the beginning, requiring a clear majority of signaling hashrate for activation to happen, indicating that the activation is relatively safe.The proposed method simplifies the activation mechanism and eliminates the need to work with different client releases and issues associated with deployed nodes with different consensus parameters. It also removes the motivation to create UASF clients that force activation and provides users and miners with time to safely fork themselves off from the chain followed by Core if they choose not to upgrade.The proposed method has received some pushback, but the hope is that it will be adopted as the default mechanism, requiring little discussion on how to activate future soft forks.Overall, the author emphasizes the need to carefully consider the implications and potential failure modes of implementing soft forks in cryptocurrency. The decreasing threshold activation proposal offers a potential solution to address some of the challenges and risks associated with soft forks.
Updated on: 2023-08-02T03:15:09.390974+00:00