Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] activation mechanism considerations

From: Melvin Carvalho <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 4 Mar 2021 10:25:41 +0100

On Thu, 4 Mar 2021 at 10:07, John Rand via bitcoin-dev <
[email-masked]> wrote:

> Consensus is important for both taproot and separately for the activation
> mechanism.  There are more soft-forks that Bitcoin will need, so it is
> important to achieve positive progress on the activation topic also, not
> get impatient and rush something ill-considered.  Not all future soft-forks
> maybe as widely supported as taproot, and yet it could become existentially
> critical that Bitcoin prevails in achieving a future upgrade in dramatic
> circumstances, even against powerful interests counter to Bitcoin user and
> investors interests.  We should treat the activation topic in a considered
> way and with decorum, provide tight non-emotive reasoning devoid of
> frustration and impatience.  This is a low drama and convenient time to
> incrementally improve activation.  People have varied views about the
> deciding factor, or even which factors resulted in segwit activating after
> BIP 141 failed using BIP 9.  We do not have to solve everything in one
> step, incremental improvement is good, for complex unintuitive topics, to
> learn as we go - and it should not be hard to do less badly than what
> transpired leading up to BIP 148 and BIP 91.  Failure to upgrade if
> permanent, or demoralizing to protocol researchers could be a systemic risk
> in itself as there are more upgrades Bitcoin will need.  We are not Ents
> but we should use our collective ingenuity to find an incremental
> improvement for activation.
>

Great high level thoughts

The Ents themselves were created in Tolkien's fork of Shakespeare, when he
was frustrated to learn that trees didnt actually march :)

Having followed standards for 10+ years consensus can be tricky

IIRC last time with segwit there was a straw poll in the wiki where devs
could express leanings in an informal, async way.  Something like that
could be of value.

There's an insightful spec written at the IETF "On Consensus and Humming in
the IETF", then IMHO is worth reading

https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7282

That said, if we could find an incorruptible machine that could gather the
highest fee tx from the mempool and post it every 10 minutes, bitcoin would
largely run itself.  So, while understanding the gravity of each change, we
could perhaps have the mindset that there are a finite number, such that
when complete bitcoin will move to an endgame where for the user it 'just
works', much like the internet.  If devs and changes are needed less, that
could be viewed as a sign of success.  This is a hand wavy way of saying
that forks could potentially be a diminishing issue over time

Just my 2 satoshis

>
> John R
> _______________________________________________
> bitcoin-dev mailing list
> [email-masked]
> https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev
>