Author: Tier Nolan 2015-05-27 11:26:33
Published on: 2015-05-27T11:26:33+00:00
The discussion between Peter Todd and Tier Nolan suggests that the median time mechanism is a way for hashing power to show what time they think it is, and nVersion soft-fork mechanism is a way to show what features they want to support. They also suggest that block counts are not convenient for planning as there is no guarantee that they will happen in any particular timeframe, forward and back. The deadline need not be set accurately and a roughly six-month deadline should work fine, but a majority of miners would be needed to abuse the median time. To reduce "noise," the number of blocks used in the median could be increased to show the median time, which could be calculated as the median of the last 144 blocks plus 12 hours. Furthermore, the use of the median time mechanism would make it easier to write the code and reduce the state that needs to be stored per BIP as one would not need to check if the previous BIPs were all accepted. Each bit would be assigned to a particular BIP for a specific range of times or blocks. If block numbers were used for the deadline, one would just need to check the block index for the deadline block. Moreover, the phrasing of the 95% rule was ambiguous, and clarification was needed. It was suggested that the current system, where blocks that were part of the 750-rule also count towards the 95% rule, should be used instead of making the rule checking harder.
Updated on: 2023-06-09T21:35:12.279567+00:00