On Thu, Apr 24, 2014 at 12:58 AM, Mike Hearn <m...@plan99.net> wrote: > The complexity overhead is trivial - we already used coinbase scriptSigs for > voting on P2SH, I'm sure it'll be used for voting on other things in future > too.
We use coinbase sigs to gauge the safety of enforcing a soft fork several times and not just for P2SH, to determine when enforcement of it will be decisive and not result in risking a partition in the network that might permit transaction reversals. This is not voting. As a feature decision mechanism his is a rather coercive thing because it gives the highest hash-power bidders control even when their interests may be rather thoroughly unaligned with population that owns and uses bitcoin in general, but as a plain indicator of when its safe to enforce a new rule (same mechanism, different motivation— though a point is that safe usage means using much more than 50% as the threshold) it works pretty well. > .... that's hugely complex and messy. Yes, making really distributed systems that work in a complex world is hard. It certantly would be /easier/ to just declare miners "trusted parties" and require them to always collude to produce a single consensus view of the world that is always honest and never contradictory, except that it doesn't work. Because they aren't individually trusted or even trustworthy. > Why? Remember deleting coinbases with nothing more than a simple majority is > already possible in the existing protocol and always has been. Temporarily censoring transactions by orphaning otherwise valid blocks that contain them for as long as you retain a majority is possible and impossible to prevent in this architecture. This isn't the same as deleting. Deleting suggests the common misconception that a majority of miners can do anything they want. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Start Your Social Network Today - Download eXo Platform Build your Enterprise Intranet with eXo Platform Software Java Based Open Source Intranet - Social, Extensible, Cloud Ready Get Started Now And Turn Your Intranet Into A Collaboration Platform http://p.sf.net/sfu/ExoPlatform _______________________________________________ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
