Author: Anthony Towns 2022-09-16 07:15:45
Published on: 2022-09-16T07:15:45+00:00
The article discusses the challenges faced in activating soft forks on Bitcoin and proposes a new approach. The author suggests that the evaluation phase is essential to convince people of the benefits of a change, but it's difficult to do so without implementing real systems. They propose deploying the soft fork on the default global signet to demonstrate its value. However, the conundrum is that you cannot activate a soft fork on the default signet without merging it into bitcoin core, which requires evaluation via activation on the default signet. To solve this, the author proposes a fork of core called "bitcoin-inquisition," adding support for proposed consensus changes, including CTV and APO. Significantly, signet chains are permissioned, avoiding the problem of hard forks created by improvements. Miners can coordinate upgrades out-of-band, triggering activation by a single block signalling. Anyone can run their own fork of bitcoin core, avoiding promotion of proposals by miners/maintainers. Overall, the proposal offers a solution to the challenges faced in activating soft forks on Bitcoin.
Updated on: 2023-05-22T21:15:06.034550+00:00