On Wed, Sep 30, 2015 at 2:30 AM, Rusty Russell <ru...@rustcorp.com.au> wrote: > Hi all, > > Pieter and Eric pointed out that the current BIP has miners > turning off the bit as soon as it's locked in (75% testnet / 95% > mainnet). It's better for them to keep setting the bit until activation > (2016 blocks later), so network adoption is visible. > > I'm not proposing another suggestion, though I note it for future: > miners keep setting the bit for another 2016 blocks after activation, > and have a consensus rule that rejects blocks without the bit. That > would "force" upgrades on those last miners. I feel we should see how > this works first.
Actually getting rid of the immediate bit forcing was something I considered to be an advantage of versionbits over prior work. Consider, where possible we carve soft fork features out from non-standard behavior. Why do we do this? Primarily so that non-upgraded miners are not mining invalid transactions which immediately cause short lived forks once the soft-fork activates. (Secondarily to protect wallets from unconfirmed TX that won't ever confirm). The version forcing, however, guarantees existence of the same forks that the usage of non-standard prevented! I can, however, argue it the other way (and probably have in the past): 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 (which otherwise they couldn't reject without inspecting the whole thing). This is an improvement over not forcing the bit, and it's why I was previously in favor of the way the versions were enforced. But, experience has played out other ways, and thin clients have not done anything useful with the version numbers. A middle ground might be to require setting 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. Thus a thin client could treat these blocks with increased skepticism. _______________________________________________ bitcoin-dev mailing list bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev
