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243 sats \ 2 replies \ @ek 13 Dec \ parent \ on: Rationale re: covenants support wiki by Paul Sztorc bitcoin
I must admit that I’m still occasionally confused about MASF and why it’s important for enough miners to upgrade so here’s my understanding:
If a miner doesn’t upgrade, they might produce blocks containing transactions that are no longer accepted by miners and users who have upgraded. Old users would accept both new and old blocks.
So this becomes a problem if there are enough old miners generating old blocks that are invalid by the new consensus rules. This could potentially lead to a permanent chain split if these miners refuse to accept the financial loss if they would follow the new chain with the upgraded rules.
This also affects old users since they now have to pick a chain, too.
Is this wrong or is this really not a concern for @psztorc?
If this isn't a concern for him, I don't understand why he doesn't simply deploy BIP-300 (whatever that means for him), since, according to him, nobody needs to be convinced of anything to activate a soft fork since "they are opt in":
why can't he just deploy BIP-300 and have his drivechains since apparently nobody needs to be convinced of anything to activate a soft fork?
I think his point is that only miners need to run it. "Regular" nodes can go push daisies because they don't choose what goes into blocks, miners do. Note: I don't personally think regular nodes can "go push daisies," I am just trying to use colorful language to represent what I understand Paul's opinion to be.
Also, I think this "miners-only" point is related to the fact that when soft forks are up for activation, regular nodes aren't asked to do any signalling -- only miners are. So, from Paul's perspective (as I understand it), he only needs to convince miners to run his software, no one else. Unfortunately for him, it doesn't seem like miners want to run his software either.
I suspect miners like having the regular, constant stream of professional updates they get by running Bitcoin Core. If they instead ran Paul's Mainchain software (which is his fork of Bitcoin Core with bip300), they would have to rely on him and his small team to upstream the upgrades made by Core. And that sounds dangerous and unwise.
So they just stick with Core, and thus can't be bothered running his bip300 software. I believe Paul has stated that he has personally discussed bip300 with a bunch of miners, and almost all of the ones he has talked to about it are on board with the idea; except for the part about running something other than Bitcoin Core.
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That's my understanding as well, except ..
This also affects old users since they now have to pick a chain, too.
Old users will always follow the most difficult chaintip and don't need to choose afaict. They can spend their money according to old consensus rules and it's compatible with either chain ... and given enough time, it should be mined on both chains.
The old/upgraded miners are at risk of mining on the wrong tip though, and upgraded nodes that declare non-upgraded blocks as invalid are at risk of accepting spends that only appear in the upgraded blocks (which may be re-orged out).
It's worth getting up to speed on this stuff because it'll be the first forking season for most of us.
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