Author: Eric Voskuil 2017-05-13 03:26:08
Published on: 2017-05-13T03:26:08+00:00
The author of this post argues that in order to influence the decisions of miners, individuals simply need to mine themselves. Paying and trusting others to do so is unnecessary. While there is nothing wrong with paying people to run nodes or signal readiness, these ideas are not beneficial from an economic or security standpoint. In order to be part of the economic consensus and have a say in transaction ordering, individuals must run nodes and mine. The author believes that as developers, they should focus on reducing the complexities of mining and validation rather than finding ways for people to avoid participating in these distributed roles. In response to the post, Luke Dashjr commented that enforcement remains primarily by users and it is unlikely that users will pay for signaling of softforks prematurely. As long as it waits until deployment of the softfork is widespread, this risk is minimal. He suggests that this way seems strictly better than the alternative, which is UASF.Additionally, Peter Todd argues that nVersion signaling is already technically unenforceable because there are no good ways of ensuring miners actually adopt the rules they're claiming to signal. Ultimately, it's users who adopt rules, not miners, and attempting to pay miners to signal certain bits will further confuse this point. Todd believes that trying to anonymously pay anonymous miners to signal certain bits will lead to the complete breakdown of the honesty of the nVersion signaling system, currently enforced only by "gentlemans agreement". Finally, ZmnSCPxj makes a minor editorial nitpick, pointing out that one paragraph has been repeated twice for Bitcoin mainnet. The author acknowledges the mistake and thanks them for their comment.
Updated on: 2023-06-12T00:47:19.158737+00:00