I hear consensus that at some point we need a hardfork (== creating blocks that 
will not be accepted by <0.7 clients).

Miners generate block, hence they are the ones who should filter themselves 
though some consensus. 


> But we cannot just drop support for old nodes. It is completely unreasonable 
> to put the
> _majority_ of the network on a fork, without even as much as a discussion 
> about it.
> "Oh, you didn't get the memo? The rules implemented in your client are 
> outdated." - that
> is not how Bitcoin works: the network defines the rules.

Consensus was rapidly reached a day ago: To ensure the majority (all of?) the 
network could accept the blocks mined, and not just 0.8. This was the right 
decision! Too many was dependent on <=0.7

So, the question is not if, but when to do a hardfork. We need to define and 
monitor the % of nodes running different versions (preferably a weighted 
average - some nodes, like e.g. blockchain.info & mtgox serve many...). Once 
there was the rowit bitcoinstatus page - do we have another resource for this ?

Then the second question is how to ensure we don't create a fork again? Pieter 
(and others?) are of the opinion that we should mimic a 0.7 
lock-object-starvation-reject-rule. I don't like this for three reasons:
1. I find it hard to ensure we have actually coined the bug precisely
2. I expect that similar issues will happen again
3. The current issue was between two versions, but in the future it could be 
between two implementations - then trying implement or even to coordinate 
strange rules becomes very unlikely.

Hence the scheme for "considerate mining" - it is the only scheme that 
guarantees 100% that no block are released that will not be accepted by a 
supermajority of the install base.

Another nice thing about it - it requires no development :)

So simply run in serial in front of all considerate miners nodes of different 
versions until a certain threshold of the install base is reached.

/M



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