Author: Jorge Timón 2022-03-24 18:30:09
Published on: 2022-03-24T18:30:09+00:00
The conversation on Bitcoin-dev revolves around the topic of resisting a consensus change that is not liked by everyone. Jorge Timón argues that the premise of an evil fork being evil is given in a hypothetical case and refutes the claim that good people will always oppose evil, stating that they can be mistaken too. Anthony Towns responds with the suggestion that any method used to abort/veto/revert an activation with BIP8 can also be used with speedy trial activation. Speedy trial allows a minority (~10%) of hash power to abort activation and guarantees a "yes" or "no" answer within three months. Additionally, a futures market could be set up to establish which rules are most profitable for miners.Towns brings up the case of Segwit's user activated soft fork (UASF) activation attempt, which took four to six months to coordinate. Despite the risk, the UASF demonstrates how users can coordinate a software update when consensus rules head in an unacceptable direction. Furthermore, Towns provides examples of BCH and 2x futures markets and their accuracy in predicting prices.The conversation then moves on to the suggestion that a hard fork may be necessary to resist a consensus change that has overwhelming support in the bitcoin economy. The conversation also touches upon the issue of doing a hard fork coin split before the implementation of a new soft fork, as it would help avoid any distractions caused by simultaneously paying attention to both the coin split and the new soft fork.The conversation also discusses BIP8 and the resistance mechanism proposed by Luke. In order to abort a BIP8 activation, 100% of hashpower and 100% of node software needs to downgrade from anything that specifies BIP8 with mandatory activation. The conversation also talks about the accidental hard fork due to the updated software with leveldb being able to accept larger blocks than the old bdb-based bitcoind could.Finally, the conversation highlights that once software with a soft fork activated via BIP8 with mandatory activation has achieved significant adoption, the soft fork is already deployed, making it necessary to treat it as such. The author suggests that hardforking in merge-mining or a new difficulty adjustment algorithm would be a more realistic approach to avoid the instability of hashrate seen with BCH and BTC. However, the author advises against calling proposed changes "evil" as it does not aid in reasonable discussion.
Updated on: 2023-06-15T17:52:33.708138+00:00