Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] BIP: Block signal enforcement via tx fees

From: Peter Todd <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 12 May 2017 18:22:14 -0400

On Fri, May 12, 2017 at 07:22:56PM +0000, Luke Dashjr via bitcoin-dev wrote:
> I've written a new BIP draft for OP_CHECKBLOCKVERSION to allow the community 
> to put economic pressure on miners to deploy softforks without the extreme of 
> a UASF.
> 
>     https://github.com/luke-jr/bips/blob/bip-cbv/bip-cbv.mediawiki

I strongly disagree with this proposal.

nVersion signaling is already technically unenforceable, in the sense that we
don't have good ways of ensuring miners actually adopt the rules they're
claiming to signal. Equally, it's users who ultimately adopt rules, not miners,
and attempting to pay miners to signal certain bits will further confuse this
point.

Quite likely the outcome of users trying to anonymously pay anonymous miners to
signal certain bits will be the complete breakdown of the honesty of the
nVersion signalling system, currently enforced only by "gentlemans agreement".

A more productive direction would be a direct coin-owner signalling process,
with users taking action based on what provable coin-ownership has signalled.

Also, as an aside, this "specification" again shows the inadequacy and
unreadability of English language specifications. I'd strongly suggest you
delete it and instead mark the "reference implementation" as the specification.

-- 
https://petertodd.org 'peter'[:-1]@petertodd.org