To: yanmaani@cock.li,
 Bitcoin Protocol Discussion <bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org>
References: <3286a7eb-9deb-77d6-4527-58e0c5882ae2@riseup.net>
 <85745a38e4464541d6357408fae1cfed@cock.li>
From: Chris Belcher <belcher@riseup.net>
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Message-ID: <839ee260-7ac0-9c78-5348-28e80b69799f@riseup.net>
Date: Wed, 3 Mar 2021 20:48:17 +0000
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In-Reply-To: <85745a38e4464541d6357408fae1cfed@cock.li>
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Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] Making the case for flag day activation of taproot
Precedence: list

It is good that social media drama can only make its own followers fork
away. In bitcoin people represent themselves, if they want certain rules
enforced they should have to actually tell their software to do that.
The problem with BIP8 is that social media drama has a incentive to
promote brinksmanship.


It is not correct to say that this will work because "nobody will
disobey Core". In reality it will work because basically everyone either
wants taproot or has no opinion about taproot.

Your argument depends heavily on the word "egregious". I've shown that
for harmful changes like censorship can be resisted by the bitcoin
community. Can you come up with an example of a bad change which won't
be resisted?


Here's another example of an easily-resisted change: A Core team that's
been compromised might do a flag-day UASF where transactions are only
confirmed if they pay a minimum of 1000 sat/vbyte in miner fee. The
community could resist this by doing a counter-UASF where a transaction
paying just 1 sat/vbyte is required to be included in the first block
after the flay day.

What alternative do you suggest? If you advocate allowing miners to
activate soft forks then that still won't protect users. Because miners
won't save users in my above example of a 1000 sat/vbyte price floor, in
fact miners would see their income greatly increased if the soft fork
was successful. So in fact the ability to do a counter-UASF is always
what actually protected users, miner protection is nothing something to
count on.


On 03/03/2021 17:30, yanmaani@cock.li wrote:
> On 2021-03-03 14:39, Chris Belcher via bitcoin-dev wrote:
>> Enter flag day activation. With a flag day there can be no
>> brinksmanship. A social media blitz cant do anything except have its own
>> followers fork away. Crucially, miner signalling cant be used to change
>> the activation date for nodes that didn't choose to and just passively
>> follow signalling. Changing the activation date requires all those users
>> to actually run different node software.
> 
> Is that supposed to be a good thing? "We should do X because it'll work"
> doesn't prove X is actually good. These things can be evil, but they can
> also be legitimate opposition to a change. Taking away the power of a
> "social media blitz" is not guaranteed to be a good thing!
> 
>> What if one day the Core developer team uses the flag
>> day method to do something bad? The bitcoin user
>> community who wants to resist this can create their own
>> counter-soft-fork full node. This forces a chain
>> split. The real bitcoin which most people follow will be
>> the chain without censorship.
> 
> [edited for brevity]
> 
> That will only work for really egregious changes. In practice, most
> people will trust Core on all other (non-egregious) decisions, because
> of the inertia inherent in disobeying them.
> 
> What you suggest may be an efficient way to ram taproot through, but is
> it inherently good? Nothing is free. This seems like de-facto forcing
> people to go along with you, because you're convinced you're right. In
> this case, you are, but you'd be convinced you'd be right even if you
> weren't so.
> 
> You're right in suggesting that it will work, but the reason why it will
> work is because nobody wants to disobey Core. It seems immoral to
> exploit this fact.
> 
> At least you shouldn't hard-code it and require dissenters to fork away.
> I exhort you to consider making all this controversial stuff settings
> that can be changed by RPC command or command-line flag; set the default
> value sure, but requiring a fork to change it is, in my opinion,
> oppressive.
> 
> (Also consider some compromise, such as ">95% miner support before flag
> day or >33% on flag day")
> 
> Best wishes
> Yanmaani