There is a difference between miners signalling intent (as they have been for various BIPs, which is mostly informational only - they are mostly not running the code, and in some cases it is not implemented, so they cant be) there is a difference between that and a 95% miner majority consensus rule. Former can be useful information as you said, latter implies as Luke described something that is not really accurate, it is not strictly only a miner upgrade needed for basic safety as with soft-forks. If you look at BIP 103 for example it is flag day based, and I think this is a more accurate approach. Also with miner votes they can be misleading - vote for one thing, but run something else; what they are running is not generally detectable/enforceable - see for example what happened with the BIP66 accidental fork due to "SPV mining" (ie validationless mining).
A hard-fork is for everyone to upgrade and talk with each other to see that the vast majority is on the same plan which includes users, ecosystem companies & miners. Adam On 14 November 2015 at 01:02, digitsu412 via bitcoin-dev <bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org> wrote: > Well I'd like to think that with an economy all parts of it interact with > each other in ways more complex than simplistic imperative logic. > > I agree that the economic majority is essentially what matters in a hard > fork but everyone (miners,devs,public thought leaders,businesses) is part of > that economy. Additionally what miners signal as their intention affects the > decision of that economic majority (and vice versa). You can see the > effects of this in traditional political processes in how preliminary vote > polling results affect (reinforce) the final vote. > We also can see the results of this in (dare I mention) the whole XT affair > which had the signed intent of many of the economy (payment processors and > wallets and one miner pool) and the rest of the miners did not go along with > it. This experiment either means that the rest of the miners couldn't be > bothered to signal at all (because they didn't know how) or they were > affected by the influence of core devs or the opinions of others on the > matter and rejected the economic majority. (Which would imply core devs > have some power by way of indirect influence) I would be inclined to believe > the latter was more likely. > > The conclusion which this would seem to imply is that at the very least, > miners matter (to what exact extent is debatable). And although there is no > direct control of any party over the other in the strict sense, the public > vocal opinions of any part of the Bitcoin economy does have an effect in its > ability to sway the opinions of the other parts. > > Digitsu > > — Regards, > > > On Sat, Nov 14, 2015 at 7:29 AM, Luke Dashjr <l...@dashjr.org> wrote: >> >> On Friday, November 13, 2015 4:01:09 PM digi...@gmail.com wrote: >> > Forgive the frankness but I don't see why signaling your intent to >> > support >> > an upgrade to one side of a hard fork can be seen as a bad thing. If for >> > nothing else doesn't this make for a smoother flag day? (Because once >> > you >> > signal your intention, it makes it hard to back out on the commitment.) >> >> It isn't a commitment in any sense, nor does it make it smoother, because >> for >> a hardfork to be successful, it is the *economy* that must switch >> entirely. >> The miners are unimportant. >> >> > If miners don't have any choice in hard forks, who does? Just the core >> > devs? >> >> Devs have even less of a choice in the matter. What is relevant is the >> economy: who do people want to spend their bitcoins with? There is no >> programmatic way to determine this, especially not in advance, so the best >> we >> can do is a flag day that gets called off if there isn't clear consensus. >> >> Luke > > > > _______________________________________________ > 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
