Dear Bitcoin Development Community:

I would like to share my opinion that Mike is correct regarding the soft fork 
versus hard fork debate. I agree that CLTV should be done with a hard fork for 
the reasons that Mike has discussed several times in the past (mainly that a 
hard forks requires active consensus while a soft fork requires only 
indifference).  I believe this is a controversial change and—if Core Dev 
believes that controversial changes to the consensus rules must not happen—then 
my interpretation is that CLTV should not happen in its current form.  

I also agree with Mike that Core's requirement for unanimous consensus results 
in development grid lock and should be revisited.  In my opinion, the idea that 
unanimity is required should be replaced with the idea that the longest chain 
composed of valid transactions is the correct chain.  It shouldn’t matter 
really how the chain becomes the longest—only that it does.  

I believe that a good way to return power to the bitcoin community is to foster 
mutiple forkwise-compatible implementations of the protocol.  Each 
implementation could have its own governance model and design objectives and 
use techniques like BIP101’s 750/1000 signalling mechanism to activate changes 
that may be desirable to the community.  If a super majority does not support 
the change, then it won’t be activated.  I created an animated GIF that 
visualizes one possibility for how multiple protocol implementations might 
emerge over time:

https://www.reddit.com/r/bitcoinxt/comments/3nhq9t/deprecating_bitcoin_core_visualizing_the/
 
<https://www.reddit.com/r/bitcoinxt/comments/3nhq9t/deprecating_bitcoin_core_visualizing_the/>

Decentralizing development and supporting multiple forkwise-compatible 
implementations of the protocol is a worthwhile goal that will simultaneously 
make Bitcoin more robust and more responsive to the will of the market.

Nodes would express their acceptance of a block by mining on top of it.  
Consensus would be determined by the code we choose to run. 

Best regards,
Peter 


> On Oct 5, 2015, at 10:01 AM, Paul Sztorc via bitcoin-dev 
> <bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org> wrote:
> 
> On 10/5/2015 12:56 PM, Mike Hearn via bitcoin-dev wrote:
>> 
>> As everyone in the Bitcoin community has been clearly told that
>> controversial changes to the consensus rules must not happen, it's
>> clear that CLTV cannot happen in its current form.
> 
> _______________________________________________
> bitcoin-dev mailing list
> bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org
> https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev

_______________________________________________
bitcoin-dev mailing list
bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org
https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev

Reply via email to