Author: Rusty Russell 2015-09-17 21:57:51
Published on: 2015-09-17T21:57:51+00:00
A proposal has been made to enforce a new rule at 75% of mining majority, but only for blocks with the bit set. The advantage of doing this is that miners will receive early notification if they have implemented the rule incorrectly. There are three possible failures: not implementing the rule at all and not setting the bit, implementing it and setting bit but thinking some valid block is invalid, or implementing it and setting bit but thinking some invalid block is valid. The most common failure is #1, but the proposal is designed so that miners always get about two weeks' warning before those drop to SPV security. If the mining majority isn't buggy, then #2 is the worst case scenario where miners fork off and don't rejoin. Doing it early would prevent these buggy miners from contributing to the 95% threshold. However, there are two reasons Rusty believes that doing it early is not worth the extra complexity. Firstly, another delay would be needed at 75% so that #1 nodes can upgrade. Secondly, the new feature won't be exercised much before implication since it's useless before then; therefore it might not find bugs anyway. In conclusion, Rusty is not convinced by the extra complexity.
Updated on: 2023-06-10T22:21:48.397881+00:00