Currently bip99 recommends 95% miner upgrade confirmation with version bits (bip9) for uncontroversial hardforks just like it does for uncontroversial softforks. It is true that in the case of hardforks miners don't decide and it's the whole economy who has to upgrade before activation, but "the whole economy" and "all users" includes miners, so why not use the only upgrade confirmation mechanism that we have available?
The way I see it, uncontroversial softforks are also expected to be upgraded to by everyone eventually. The advantage of softforks is that non-miners don't need to do it before activation like with hardforks.
That's the only important difference I see between uncontroversial softforks and hardforks (unilateral softforks and schism hardforks are another thing though).
Please let's discuss this generally within the context of bip99 instead of discussing different deployment details with every proposal. There's a couple of threads in the ml, a couple of now merged bip99 prs in bitcoin/bips...
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 <luke@dashjr.org> wrote:
>>
>> On Friday, November 13, 2015 4:01:09 PM digitsu@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
>
>
>
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