Reduced signalling threshold activation of existing segwit deployment

Summary:

A proposal has been made to activate the existing BIP9 segwit deployment with a majority hashpower less than 95%. The proposal aims to minimize chain split risk and network disruption while maximizing backwards compatibility and still providing for rapid activation of Segregated Witness (segwit) at the 80% threshold using bit 4. By activating segwit immediately and separately from any Hard Fork (HF), it is expected to scale quickly without risking a rushed combined segwit+HF that would almost certainly cause widespread issues. The proposal suggests changing its activation logic from BIP9-style to BIP8-style with a flag day of August 1 to maintain backward compatibility with the current deployment of BIP148 nodes, and this should be for miners only.The reduced signaling threshold activation of existing segwit deployment is proposed to increase block size, fix transaction malleability, make scripting easier to upgrade, and bring many other benefits. A simple majority of miners should coordinate the activation of the existing segwit deployment with less than 95% hashpower. Since a complete redeployment of segwit is difficult before the existing deployment expires due to 0.13.1+ having many segwit related features active already, including all the P2P components, the new network service flag, the witness-tx and block messages, compact blocks v2 and preferential peering, such a redeployment will need to redefine all these things and doing so before expiry would greatly complicate testing.While this BIP is active, all blocks must set the nVersion header top 3 bits to 001 together with bit field (1 << 4). The proposal is compatible with the existing "segwit" bit 1 deployment scheduled between midnight November 15th, 2016, and midnight November 15th, 2017. Miners will need to upgrade their nodes to support segsignal; otherwise, they may build on top of an invalid block. While this bip is active users should either upgrade to segsignal or wait for additional confirmations when accepting payments.

Updated on: 2023-06-12T01:09:23.198923+00:00