Author: Gregory Maxwell 2015-09-30 02:57:52
Published on: 2015-09-30T02:57:52+00:00
Rusty Russell, a developer, brought up the issue that current BIP has miners turning off the bit as soon as it's locked in, but it is better for them to keep setting the bit until activation so network adoption is visible. He proposed another suggestion where miners keep setting the bit for another 2016 blocks after activation, and have a consensus rule that rejects blocks without the bit. This would "force" upgrades on those last miners. However, getting rid of the immediate bit forcing was something he considered to be an advantage of versionbits over prior work.He explained that soft fork features are carved out from non-standard behavior to prevent non-upgraded miners from mining invalid transactions which immediately cause short-lived forks once the soft-fork activates. The version forcing guarantees the existence of the same forks that the usage of non-standard prevented. On the other hand, the bit is easily checked by thin clients, so thin clients could use it to reject potentially ill-fated blocks from non-upgraded miners post-switch if required to set the bit for a period of time after rule enforcing begins, but don't enforce the bit, just enforce validity of the block under new rules.
Updated on: 2023-05-19T22:10:35.204064+00:00