You might be interested in my bip-uaversionbits proposal https://github.com/shaolinfry/bips/blob/bip-uavb/bip-uaversionbits.mediawiki Segwit has proven more contentious to activate than anticipated (although my read has long been that the technical consensus is clear, despite noisy objections). No matter which method is used to eventually activate segwit, or on what timeline, it would be beneficial if validating nodes already capable of supporting segwit could, without further upgrades, eventually participate to their fullest capacity. BIP9 assignments should reserve a backward compatibility bit which all yet-unknown segwit-compatible proposals may utilize. These future proposals must be consensus compatible with BIPs 141, 143, & 147, except that they may use different deployment logic. The motivation is so that any validating node software released after this BIP9 assignment can eventually understand if segwit is activated by alternate means, even when the node is itself a legacy version. This is important because the realities of system administration on the Bitcoin network are that upgrades occur slowly (which is inherent in the security choice of not presenting an auto-upgrade feature). Even though segwit in particular is backwards compatible with old validating nodes, there are still distinct advantages to validating and generating segregated witness transactions. For example, future BIP9-compatible deployment attempts might additionally include a date-dependent UASF fallback. If, either during or after activation, deployment rules also require signaling for segwit using the backwards-compatible bit here proposed, then (after 95% of recent blocks signal for the alternate segwit deployment) more legacy nodes would understand and validate transactions using segregated witnesses. An expiration time of five years seems conservative: // Alternate Deployment 1 of SegWit (BIP141, BIP143, and BIP147) consensus.vDeployments[Consensus::DEPLOYMENT_SEGWIT_ALT1].bit = 2; consensus.vDeployments[Consensus::DEPLOYMENT_SEGWIT_ALT1].nStartTime = 1510704000; // November 15th, 2017. consensus.vDeployments[Consensus::DEPLOYMENT_SEGWIT_ALT1].nTimeout = 1668470400; // November 15th, 2022. Segwit deployment logic would then look like: bool IsWitnessEnabled(const CBlockIndex* pindexPrev, const Consensus::Params& params) { LOCK(cs_main); return (VersionBitsState(pindexPrev, params, Consensus::DEPLOYMENT_SEGWIT, versionbitscache) == THRESHOLD_ACTIVE) || (VersionBitsState(pindexPrev, params, Consensus::DEPLOYMENT_SEGWIT_ALT1, versionbitscache) == THRESHOLD_ACTIVE); } _______________________________________________ bitcoin-dev mailing list bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev