On 6 March 2017 at 18:18, David Vorick via bitcoin-dev <bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org> wrote: > User activated soft forks, or perhaps more accurately called 'economically > forced soft forks' are a tool to use if the miners are in clear opposition > to the broader economy.
I don't think they work for that, at least not for new features, because miners will presumably just head the whole thing off by orphaning the whole class of non-standard transactions that are the subject of the fork. In the SegWit case, they'd just orphan anything that looks like a SegWit transaction, valid or not. That way they don't need to worry about ending up on the wrong side of the upgrade, because no transaction affected by the proposed rule change will ever get into the longest chain. Rational node operators (particularly exchanges) will likely also adopt their stricter rule change, since they know any chain that breaks it will end up being orphaned, so you don't want to act on a payment that you see confirmed in it. So then you're back where you started, except that your soft-fork is now a de-facto hard-fork, because you have to undo the new, stricter rule that the miners introduced to head off your shenannigans. Where they're interesting is where you can do something meaningful by forcing some transactions through on a once-off basis. For example, if the Chinese government identified an address belonging to Uighur separatists and leaned on Chinese miners to prevent anything from that address confirming, it might be interesting for users to say, "If these utxos are not spent by block X, your block is invalid". They might also be interesting for feature upgrades in a world where mining is radically decentralized and upgrades are fighting against inertia rather than opposition, but sadly that's not the world we currently live in. -- -- Edmund Edgar Founder, Social Minds Inc (KK) Twitter: @edmundedgar Linked In: edmundedgar Skype: edmundedgar http://www.socialminds.jp Reality Keys @realitykeys supp...@realitykeys.com https://www.realitykeys.com _______________________________________________ bitcoin-dev mailing list bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev
