Author: Roy Badami 2015-05-07 20:00:23
Published on: 2015-05-07T20:00:23+00:00
The context discusses the need for more discussion surrounding the implementation of a hard fork in the Bitcoin system. The author believes that establishing a rough consensus on the level of supermajority required to establish consensus is essential before debating specific hard fork proposals. Gavin Andresen has proposed varying levels of supermajority, from 99% to 80%, of miners needed to trigger a hard fork. Additionally, Gavin has mentioned a mechanism for a hard fork involving full node consensus and a preceding soft fork, which requires further explanation. The author believes that a supermajority of miners must be sufficiently large to avoid forking Bitcoin into two competing coins, and suggests that approximately 97.2% of miners (35/36th) is the minimum level of consensus they would be comfortable with. This level ensures that the rump coin will initially have an average confirmation time of 6 hours until difficulty adjusts, making it far enough from viable that holdouts will quickly desert it.
Updated on: 2023-06-09T19:51:47.055748+00:00