📅 Original date posted:2022-04-30
📝 Original message:I’ve been in two minds on whether to completely move on to other topics or to formulate some thoughts on the recent attempt to activate a contentious soft fork. In the interests of those of us who have wasted days/weeks/months of our time on this (with no personal upside) and who don’t want to repeat this exercise again I thought I should at least raise the issue for discussion of what should be done differently if this is tried again in future.
This could be Jeremy with OP_CTV at a later point (assuming it is still contentious) or anyone who wants to pick up a single opcode that is not yet activated on Bitcoin and try to get miners to signal for it bypassing technical concerns from many developers, bypassing Bitcoin Core and bypassing users.
Maybe the whole thing worked as designed. Some users identified what was going on, well known Bitcoin educators such as Andreas Antonopoulos, Jimmy Song etc brought additional attention to the dangers, a URSF movement started to gain momentum and those attempting a contentious soft fork activation backed off. (Disappointingly Bitcoin Optech didn't cover my previous posts to this mailing list [1], [2], [3] highlighting the dangers many months ago or recent posts. Normally Optech is very high signal.)
Alternatively this was the first time a contentious soft fork activation was attempted, we were all woefully unprepared for it and none of us knew what we were doing.
I’m unsure on the above. I’d be interested to hear thoughts. What I am sure of is that it is totally unacceptable for one individual to bring the entire Bitcoin network to the brink of a chain split. There has to be a personal cost to that individual dissuading them from trying it again otherwise they’re motivated to try it again every week/month. Perhaps the personal cost that the community is now prepared if that individual tries it again is sufficient. I’m not sure. Obviously Bitcoin is a permissionless network, Bitcoin Core and other open source projects are easily forked and no authority (I’m certainly no authority) can stop things like this happening again.
I’ll follow the responses if people have thoughts (I won't be responding to the instigators of this contentious soft fork activation attempt) but other than that I’d like to move on to other things than contentious soft fork activations. Thanks to those who have expressed concerns publicly (too many to name, Bob McElrath was often wording arguments better than I could) and who were willing to engage with the URSF conversation. If an individual can go directly to miners to get soft forks activated bypassing technical concerns from many developers, bypassing Bitcoin Core and bypassing users Bitcoin is fundamentally broken. The reason I still have hope that it isn't is that during a period of general apathy some people were willing to stand up and actively resist it.
[1]: https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2021-October/019535.html
[2]: https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2022-January/019728.html
[3]: https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2022-April/020235.html
--
Michael Folkson
Email: michaelfolkson at [protonmail.com](http://protonmail.com/)
Keybase: michaelfolkson
PGP: 43ED C999 9F85 1D40 EAF4 9835 92D6 0159 214C FEE3
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Michael Folkson [ARCHIVE] /
npub103…2kpam
2023-06-07 23:08:38
in reply to nevent1q…2l54
Author Public Key
npub103ycruxnchhvja33mcnnkfdkgd0s7vlqlfkvufcdm5lnhpuh6f4q82kpamPublished at
2023-06-07 23:08:38Event JSON
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"content": "📅 Original date posted:2022-04-30\n📝 Original message:I’ve been in two minds on whether to completely move on to other topics or to formulate some thoughts on the recent attempt to activate a contentious soft fork. In the interests of those of us who have wasted days/weeks/months of our time on this (with no personal upside) and who don’t want to repeat this exercise again I thought I should at least raise the issue for discussion of what should be done differently if this is tried again in future.\n\nThis could be Jeremy with OP_CTV at a later point (assuming it is still contentious) or anyone who wants to pick up a single opcode that is not yet activated on Bitcoin and try to get miners to signal for it bypassing technical concerns from many developers, bypassing Bitcoin Core and bypassing users.\n\nMaybe the whole thing worked as designed. Some users identified what was going on, well known Bitcoin educators such as Andreas Antonopoulos, Jimmy Song etc brought additional attention to the dangers, a URSF movement started to gain momentum and those attempting a contentious soft fork activation backed off. (Disappointingly Bitcoin Optech didn't cover my previous posts to this mailing list [1], [2], [3] highlighting the dangers many months ago or recent posts. Normally Optech is very high signal.)\n\nAlternatively this was the first time a contentious soft fork activation was attempted, we were all woefully unprepared for it and none of us knew what we were doing.\n\nI’m unsure on the above. I’d be interested to hear thoughts. What I am sure of is that it is totally unacceptable for one individual to bring the entire Bitcoin network to the brink of a chain split. There has to be a personal cost to that individual dissuading them from trying it again otherwise they’re motivated to try it again every week/month. Perhaps the personal cost that the community is now prepared if that individual tries it again is sufficient. I’m not sure. Obviously Bitcoin is a permissionless network, Bitcoin Core and other open source projects are easily forked and no authority (I’m certainly no authority) can stop things like this happening again.\n\nI’ll follow the responses if people have thoughts (I won't be responding to the instigators of this contentious soft fork activation attempt) but other than that I’d like to move on to other things than contentious soft fork activations. Thanks to those who have expressed concerns publicly (too many to name, Bob McElrath was often wording arguments better than I could) and who were willing to engage with the URSF conversation. If an individual can go directly to miners to get soft forks activated bypassing technical concerns from many developers, bypassing Bitcoin Core and bypassing users Bitcoin is fundamentally broken. The reason I still have hope that it isn't is that during a period of general apathy some people were willing to stand up and actively resist it.\n\n[1]: https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2021-October/019535.html\n\n[2]: https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2022-January/019728.html\n\n[3]: https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2022-April/020235.html\n\n--\nMichael Folkson\nEmail: michaelfolkson at [protonmail.com](http://protonmail.com/)\nKeybase: michaelfolkson\nPGP: 43ED C999 9F85 1D40 EAF4 9835 92D6 0159 214C FEE3\n-------------- next part --------------\nAn HTML attachment was scrubbed...\nURL: \u003chttp://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/attachments/20220430/0b8a6f2f/attachment.html\u003e",
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