Author: Antoine Riard 2022-09-18 18:47:38
Published on: 2022-09-18T18:47:38+00:00
Anthony Towns, a Bitcoin developer, has proposed the idea of "bitcoin-inquisition," which is a fork of the Bitcoin Core that would add support for proposed changes to consensus such as CTV, APO and TLUV. The aim is to establish an alternative approach to doing consensus upgrades without having a trusted group or centralised solution. The proposed approach involves four stages: research, development, evaluation, and deployment.The most significant problem in the evaluation phase is convincing enough people that a change is beneficial enough to justify the risk of messing with their money. To demonstrate real value from the change, it is necessary to implement real systems on top of the proposed change. However, there is a conundrum if one activates a soft fork on the default signet before merging the code into bitcoin core, which is required to evaluate it.Therefore, Towns suggests that bitcoin-inquisition could be deployed on the default global signet, allowing anyone interested to test the proposed changes publicly and have pre-existing signet infrastructure available. This approach also provides a platform for multiple consensus changes to be deployed in one place, making it easier to compare alternative approaches. Signet chains being permissioned provide a benefit in that miners can coordinate upgrading out of band, eliminating the need for a 90% signalling threshold.Bitcoin developer AJ Towns has proposed a new activation method for consensus changes called "bitcoin-inquisition", aimed at simplifying and expediting the process of activating proposals. Rather than requiring individual blocks to signal for multiple forks, bitcoin-inquisition would allow for up to 2**29 signals with a standard signal consisting of 16 bits for specifying a bip number and 8 bits for specifying a version of that bip. The proposal is based solely off stable releases of bitcoin core and may help consensus changes be easily backported once they move into the deployment phase. Towns is unsure about the level of code quality pull requests should have before being merged into bitcoin-inquisition but believes contributions can influence what becomes the tradition. There are concerns that the proposal could make the global default signet miners or the bitcoin-inquisition maintainers the "trusted group" to avoid. However, anyone can run their own fork of bitcoin core, so it is possible to work around any arbitrary blocking of proposals by miners or maintainers. Moreover, they are separate from the actions required for actual deployment once activation is complete and will not have any undue ability to promote fork proposals that people aren't fully satisfied are ready for deployment.
Updated on: 2023-06-16T00:19:41.219417+00:00