What you're describing is a hashpower activated soft fork to censor transactions, in response to a user activated soft fork that the majority of hashpower disagrees with.
It is always possible for a majority of hashpower to censor transactions they disagree with. Users may view that as an attack, and can always respond with a POW hard fork. Bitcoin only works if the majority of hashpower is not hostile to the users. On 6 March 2017 9:29:35 PM AEDT, Edmund Edgar via bitcoin-dev <bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org> wrote: >On 6 March 2017 at 18:18, David Vorick via bitcoin-dev ><bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org> wrote: >> User activated soft forks, or perhaps more accurately called >'economically >> forced soft forks' are a tool to use if the miners are in clear >opposition >> to the broader economy. > >I don't think they work for that, at least not for new features, >because miners will presumably just head the whole thing off by >orphaning the whole class of non-standard transactions that are the >subject of the fork. In the SegWit case, they'd just orphan anything >that looks like a SegWit transaction, valid or not. That way they >don't need to worry about ending up on the wrong side of the upgrade, >because no transaction affected by the proposed rule change will ever >get into the longest chain. Rational node operators (particularly >exchanges) will likely also adopt their stricter rule change, since >they know any chain that breaks it will end up being orphaned, so you >don't want to act on a payment that you see confirmed in it. So then >you're back where you started, except that your soft-fork is now a >de-facto hard-fork, because you have to undo the new, stricter rule >that the miners introduced to head off your shenannigans. > >Where they're interesting is where you can do something meaningful by >forcing some transactions through on a once-off basis. For example, if >the Chinese government identified an address belonging to Uighur >separatists and leaned on Chinese miners to prevent anything from that >address confirming, it might be interesting for users to say, "If >these utxos are not spent by block X, your block is invalid". > >They might also be interesting for feature upgrades in a world where >mining is radically decentralized and upgrades are fighting against >inertia rather than opposition, but sadly that's not the world we >currently live in. _______________________________________________ bitcoin-dev mailing list bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev
