vnprc on Nostr: I'm reading The Blocksize War right now, this was a central point of disagreement ...
I'm reading The Blocksize War right now, this was a central point of disagreement between the factions. The small blockers believed not and they won unconditionally. That pretty much settled the question.
It used to be the case that Satoshi would just yolo a new client out there with a consensus rule change and everybody would upgrade. This was what we would call a UASF today. So UASF was the original form of soft fork. As bitcoin grew in value the drawbacks of this system started to become known. It's a risky play because you can't prevent a fork from occurring if some mining node with significant hashrate doesn't upgrade in time and mines a block that is invalid under the new, more restrictive, rules.
Starting with the CLTV soft fork, developers implemented activation signaling logic. The idea is to get miners to explicitly opt in to the ruleset change by flipping a block header bit from 0 to 1 in the blocks they mine. This was the beginning of miner 'voting' on soft forks. It wasn't long before motivated reasoning lead some parties to conclude that miners controlled the chain. They went to war with this belief and, well, the rest is history.
The reason node runners want to poll block producers before activating a consensus rule change is to prevent a disastrous chain fork and potential wipeout reorgs. This would be bad for all bitcoiners, regardless of which set of consensus rules their node enforces. Block template producers can vote with their blocks to delay a fork only if the fork attempt is made with activation signaling logic.
Basically miners can say no if users ask nicely. If users can't get their fork activated the nice way, they can get out the nuke launch codes and run a UASF client.
It used to be the case that Satoshi would just yolo a new client out there with a consensus rule change and everybody would upgrade. This was what we would call a UASF today. So UASF was the original form of soft fork. As bitcoin grew in value the drawbacks of this system started to become known. It's a risky play because you can't prevent a fork from occurring if some mining node with significant hashrate doesn't upgrade in time and mines a block that is invalid under the new, more restrictive, rules.
Starting with the CLTV soft fork, developers implemented activation signaling logic. The idea is to get miners to explicitly opt in to the ruleset change by flipping a block header bit from 0 to 1 in the blocks they mine. This was the beginning of miner 'voting' on soft forks. It wasn't long before motivated reasoning lead some parties to conclude that miners controlled the chain. They went to war with this belief and, well, the rest is history.
The reason node runners want to poll block producers before activating a consensus rule change is to prevent a disastrous chain fork and potential wipeout reorgs. This would be bad for all bitcoiners, regardless of which set of consensus rules their node enforces. Block template producers can vote with their blocks to delay a fork only if the fork attempt is made with activation signaling logic.
Basically miners can say no if users ask nicely. If users can't get their fork activated the nice way, they can get out the nuke launch codes and run a UASF client.