Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] UASF (LOT=true) kick off meeting - Tuesday March 2nd 19:00 UTC on ##uasf IRC channel

From: Eric Voskuil <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 2 Mar 2021 12:19:41 -0800

I personally don’t like the term 51% attack as applied to censorship. A miner is free to mine or not mine any transactions it wants (censor). The term attack is better reserved for stealing from someone (reclaiming spends using hash power), as it implies a moral distinction.

But 51% attack is the term in common use for a majority censor and using it helps people understand the mechanism of hash power soft fork enforcement. It’s not intended as a pejorative. 

However “without social support” is a political term. It confuses the actual behavior to imply the mechanism is somehow not the same because there is some ill-defined level of agreement.

e

> On Mar 2, 2021, at 10:58, Luke Dashjr via bitcoin-dev <[email-masked]> wrote:
> 
> On Tuesday 02 March 2021 18:22:35 Ariel Lorenzo-Luaces via bitcoin-dev wrote:
>> I'm realizing that a clear advantage of LOT=false is that it can happen
>> without the need for a social movement. All that is really needed is the
>> convincing of 95% miners. Apathetic users will never notice any kind of
>> service disruption no matter the success or failure of the activation. This
>> is obviously why it naturally became the default activation method.
> 
> No. Miners enforcing rules without the social support is a 51% attack, not a 
> softfork.
> 
>> While LOT=true, on the other hand, must be able to 51% the blockchain to
>> win the apathetic users. But then the reorgs will not be pretty. Or if it
>> ever clearly gets over the 51% hurdle then all apathetic users now need to
>> scramble to use the rogue client to be safe from reorgs. Either way it's
>> disruptive.
> 
> No, LOT=True doesn't do this. It only happens if miners choose to create an 
> invalid chain, which they could do at any time with or without a softfork 
> involved.
> 
> Luke
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