Published on: 2022-05-13T12:23:39+00:00
A proposal has been made to change the activation mechanism for soft forks in Bitcoin. The proposal suggests removing the lockinontimeout (LOT) flag and instead calculating the MUST_SIGNAL state based on the threshold reached. This proposal also introduces tri-state version signaling that can encode both active support and active opposition to a soft fork. However, some concerns were raised about the potential risk of taking a large fraction of mining hardware offline for an extended period of time with this new mechanism.Russell O'Connor responded to the proposal, stating that the MUST_SIGNAL state is no longer necessary as there are currently no other clients to activate alongside a BIP8 deployment. He proposed using an anti-fork signal that only needs to be on a single block and can be almost anything to prepare for an "anti-fork." Russell also mentioned the risk of losing mining power if miners do not conform or are unable to conform to the version bits signal over multiple blocks. He suggested various solutions, including developers planning and shipping binaries with activation code in time, mining pools participating in discussions and hiring competent developers, and reaching out to the community for help if needed.Another user named Billy Tetrud provided feedback on the proposal, acknowledging its usefulness and agreeing that there are issues with the current activation methods. Billy suggested a minor improvement to specify "minimum_activation_blocks" instead of "minimum_activation_height" for easier reasoning and flexibility. He gave a concept ACK and expressed the preference for future soft forks to use a previously specified activation mechanism rather than rolling out rushed implementations.In conclusion, the concept of a MUST_SIGNAL state for BIP8 activation has been deemed unnecessary by some developers. The purpose of mandatory signaling was to ensure all existing clients waiting for SegWit signaling would be activated together with any BIP8 clients, but it is no longer necessary. There are alternative design choices available that do not pose the risk of taking a significant amount of mining hardware offline. The proposal suggests using version bit signaling and a soft-fork signal on a single block. Additionally, solutions were proposed to address the risk of losing mining power, such as better planning, active participation from mining pools, and collaboration within the developer community.Overall, the discussion revolves around the optimization of soft fork activation methods in Bitcoin and finding alternatives to the MUST_SIGNAL state in BIP8. The proposals and feedback provided offer insights into potential improvements and considerations for future soft forks.
Updated on: 2023-08-02T06:30:03.022610+00:00