Bitcoin Forum

This is an experiment, if the poll shows 90%+ votes for one option for over 12hours, a donation will be made to https://worldaid.org/donate-bitcoin-for-charity/. you can change your vote at will, and discuss / try to get everyone to agree to a specific option.

What should be the threshold for saying "miners are in agreement BIP XXX wins!"
assume that only miners that vote count, miners that don't make an effort to vote are said to throw away their vote and are not considered.

good luck.

First all BIPs need to get its place here - https://github.com/bitcoin/bips

People can not take decission on scattered information.

huh? this is just an experiment to see if a bunch of poeple who have different opinions can agree to all agree to the same thing for a tiny reward.

Simple but clear majority seems to be the consensus point.

sure it's likely that the 25% that don't agree with will fall into line, but can we really call 75% a successful agreement

lets all vote 90%

Interesting. Let see how it goes.

But that assumes all miners are paying attention.  Which technically they are, but that's a factor of centralization of mining.

In an ideal - cpu mining from the client - world....75% would be more than sufficient.

let's assume that only miners that vote count, miners that don't make an effort to vote are said to throw away their vote and are not considered.

No way there will not be 10% of trolls whose only goal in this experiment will be to make it fail. I voted 75% and will not change my vote because I think it is the best answer, not that anyone care. XT is the way to save BTC from corruption, but there are already too many dumbs in Bitcoin world to avoid the best decision to be taken. I also think that 65% is actually enough.

But that assumes that internet bandwidth is uniform around the world and that all the miners technical challenges are uniform. 75% is still sufficient.

Miners who don't vote means they'd rather keep the current limit. Currently they are the majority, either not have implemented the vote or don't want to change anything at all

If you have worked for 3000+ developer enterprise level IT systems for over 10 years, you will understand how much wisdom in this saying: "As long as it works, don't fix it"  And I suppose that many of the IT veterans here hold the same view

what if leaving it alone will leads to 1-10$ fee pre TX + slow confirmation times?

That is indeed the best course of action. For now. But it is also better to upgrade and patch something before it will be too late and and network will be slowed down.

It is hard to chose where percentage consensus can be achieved, I honestly would like to have 90% of votes here.

Capacity planning trumps the "if it ain't broke, don't try to fix it" point, which is usually very good advice.

There will be signs that showing a system is approaching its design limit, when you have more and more frequent complain from different users, its time to plan an upgrade

Humans are adaptive, when banks are closed during weekends, they don't dispute the way that bank works, they just patiently wait until Monday. Same, if bitcoin network is experiencing traffic jam, they will take temporary measure to reduce the transaction frequency and increase the amount transferred each time, to make it more competitive fee wise

So, this ability of adapt to change will give people enough time to implement a new solution

looks like i wont have to make a donation to worldaid.org

75% voting majority plus a 2-week grace period should see a wave of laggards move across and the total becomes more like 90% anyway before the change takes effect.

First of all I think I think is wonderful experiment!

Me personally I see 75% as a threshold for "supermajority" but not "consensus" and I think the two should be separated into two different categories.

I think with the 75% threshold the risk is still too high to have a large section of the community that disagrees with the decision of the MINERS lets not forget these are MINERs that are voting here, and so that section of the community could threaten to split the chain in the event of a fork.

In the interest of avoiding this scenario which could be argued to be the DEATH of Bitcoin as we know it, I propose that 90% should be the threshold for consensus. As we have seen with the XT proposal of 75% fork, we see a VERY LARGE and VERY DETERMINED group threatening to split bitcoin into two different chains. This should be evidence that 75% is not enough for a successful fork, and we should all push for 90% agreement as consensus!

In this video: https://youtu.be/sE7998qfjgk

Andreas Antonopoulos states that there is a voting period during which miners vote with their hashing power on the new version, and once a "supermajority" of 75% is reached this is a signal to the rest of the minors to agree to the new version, this is "the grace Period", once 95% of the previous thousand blocks are ALL signed with the new version, this is a "transition period", after 95% consensus is reached, then all none new version blocks are then considered invalid and are rejected as invalid.

So once the previous 1000 blocks reaches 75% it signals that the new version is required, and 95% signals that all non new version blocks are rejected.

Now I am confused as to what constitutes "consensus", is it 75% or 95%?

Also at the end of his video he shows that if you go against consensus and try to maintain an alternate block chain you will essentially be expending mining power for nothing and losing money. It makes more financial sense for the miners to mine the longer chain with consensus than it does to risk expending expensive energy to mine an alternate chain that is an extremely high likelihood of discontinuing and thus refunding all transactions and mining rewards that cannot be spent until after 100 blocks are mined anyway.

Miners would have to mine the alternate chain for 100 blocks on faith that it will be maintained for a full 100 blocks, risking waisting a lot of time and energy and money for nothing, when they could be just mining the valid chain that has reached full consensus for a change.

All transactions that are made on both chains during a maintained fork are known as "double spends" that are eventually refunded and erased from history.

Very informative video!

if you care about the poor kids in africa you'll change your vote.

Just so everyone is aware, a modification of this experiment is going on here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1162199.20

In which the incentive to reach consensus is a chance to win free bitcoins!  :D The contest ends tonight at 3 AM so make sure change your vote to 90% before then so we all have a chance of winning!


For this experiment it may be the case that people do not care about poor kids in africa  :-\ perhaps it is not enough incentive… And also perhaps a time limit is required to reach a conclusions. Either way I like that there are two versions of the experiment so we can see which works best, participate in both!

75% is at 51.1%

please change your votes to 75%, do it for the kids.

I guess, the only thing, this experiment will prove, is that there are always enough people on a forum to troll an experiment.
I don't think, you can apply that to Bitcoin.

Just be the benevolent dictator and drop the hammer on what you prefer. People can deal with it or go play with the traffic.

Well at least around here we have enough of these famous trolls. I mean this must be the forum with the most trolls out on the Internet. If we would be able to pay them for their trolling, they would be already rich.

did anyone vote anything other then 75% and isn't trolling?

why? please lets hear your thoughts.

I changed my vote to 75% because I think it has the best chance at gaining 90%  ;D (ironically 90% is well in the lead on the modified experiment poll)

I voted higher than 75% as I was thinking about bitcoin and think majority consent should be set to a higher standard for more serious discussions. While 75% may seem like a good majority I think too many people go with the crowd, so it might not represent their true feelings.

I know plenty of people even in real life elections are influenced by polls and vote for the candidate in the lead as they "Don't want to waste their vote on a losing candidate" which if they would step back they would realize their vote is wasted by not voting for who they feel would do the best job, regardless of outcome. Since so many people do this, their beliefs become a self-fulfilling prophesy. Thus why I think 75% is too low to represent a true consensus, as at least a third of that 75% are too easily influenced in their views. In other words I believe only a fraction of the majority really understand and have a deep commitment to their view, or a follow the herd mentality.

As far as to the accuracy of this poll, I feel along with the above statements, that there will simply be people to try and disrupt your poll for the fun of it (trolling).

I voted 95% and am not trolling. This thread has not given a compelling argument to change my mind, my opinion cannot be bought out so easily.

well consider this, if you set the bar for minimal hashing at 95% a large miner or pool can single handedly veto the change and ruin it for everyone else, in which case it's likely that the network would simple go ahead with the change anyway. 95% is ideal but not a good minimal limit.

Ok, assuming 95% is not a good threshold, why is 75% the best option?

1) what individual miners want doesn't matter. in the end miners will mine the most popular chain, because $_$
2) 25% of miners saying "no" means they wouldn't be able to do any serious damage to new chain even if they ALL worked together to try and break BTC ( again highly unlikely, most will just accept the new chain and be thankful they got a chance to vote )
3) 75% is high enough to make sure the BIP by and large addresses most people's concerns, it wouldn't be easy to get 75%, its likly the BIP would have the make some changes along the way to TRY and accommodate everyone.

Consider it from an average user point of view, which would likely be: wtf? Just get the lowest possible robust threshold (75%) to win in order to get things moving.

If you have invested in mining, you don't ever want to find yourself out in the cold mining a useless chain. As soon as most people agree on something, you would want to switch over and follow the crowd.

Keeping the vote open for a near 100% majority just extends the voting time, which users might view as a risk to their 'store of value'.

What's the worst that could happen? Bad fork? Revert. DDoS attacks? Revert.

The miner support level needs to be such that it's extremely unlikely the fork could turn out to be the weaker of the two. 75% with two weeks lead time seems reasonable assuming honest miners.

However, a miner with more than 25% of total hashrate could cause the fork pretty serious damage by mining bigger blocks (in the current case) just long enough to trigger the fork, and then reverting back to the old software. This would leave the "new" fork weaker than the "old" one. Granted, it'd also be quite expensive and the results for miners needing to sell their coins would be unpredictable. But it's an attack within the realm of possibility given a determined, large miner.

To avoid the latter attack, the required miner support level needs to be something like 50% + % of hashrate held by the largest single or colluding mining operation(s).

assuming the other BIPs have merit too, and it's not that the other miners necessarily disagree with that BIP but would rather another BIP. >75% all agreeing to one thing is hard! and its unlikely all losing miners would turn on the network in anger... I don't go causing a riot when a gov election wins with a minority vote.

having 75% pretty much guarantees that that BIP is some how superior

if all BIPs were all equally good you'd expect the voting to reflect that.

I meant more of a scenario where the BIP has support in the range of 50% and a large miner on the opposing side gets worried. With sufficient hashrate, they have the option to force the fork and then destroy the fork. I'm not sure the financial incentives would ever really be there, but looking at the debate, it seems more like a blue vs. red battle than a rational discussion, so you have to assume stupid things can get done.

edit: of course, currently there's no single pool that could do this. I guess I just like poking at obscure scenarios...

What would happen if the 25% side continues on using their version of the fork? Do you think 25% of the current Bitcoin community (yes, this statement assumes the percentage of miners is proportional to the Bitcoin community) could still thrive on their own? Do you think this would negatively affect the other 75%?

I am not expecting answers to those questions, but they are things I consider when thinking about a 75% consensus threshold.

I tend to agree that my 95% vote is ideal and probably not realistic. Is 75% the best, most realistic option? I don't know, but my current opinion is that it should probably be somewhere between the two options.

I agree, Andreas Antonopoulos suggests that 75% is a trigger for a signal to the network that consensus is about to be reached and everyone should at that point change to the proposal that has reached that point. There is then a "grace period" I don't know if it's two weeks or what time frame it is but the goal at that point is to then hit the threshold of 95% before making the actual transition.

This suggests that 75% supermajority is different than the 95% consensus, which of course in the end 100% is the real goal.

So a consensus is reached by poor kids in africa?  ::)

what this Experiment is all about:
the poor kids in africa getting a break represents the small reward of actually getting some progress BIP implemented. that is the common goal which makes people want to reach consensus. This Experiment is to test the theory that, if the incentive to reach consensus is strong enough, even a big group can be made to agree; at the same time we answer the question what % agreement can we reasonably expect.

I don't think poor kids in Africa is strong enough incentive unfortunately, I think perhaps a more accurate model that reflects a BIP decision is one that directly benefits everyone involved. Perhaps an alteration to this experiment is one in which we get together a pot of Bitcoins put up by interested parties (me, you, whoever else) and we promise to payout equally splitting the money to all participants once consensus is reached. Perhaps implementing Peter's model of higher probability of payout with the higher consensus percentage that is decided upon, but with the alteration of a payout to all participants rather than a lottery of "five lucky participants".

I think there should be no time limit, only the requirement that the consensus is held for 12 consecutive hours. And also for a good result in the experiment we would have to convince the mods not to bury the poll deep in the gaming section of the forum were no one every goes to ensure good participation and a large enough sample.

I would be interested to see if after any given option reaches the 75% threshold if that option could reaching 90% or even 95% within the 12 hour period following. This is to test to see if 75% supermajorities really do lead to consensus or if there is large group of unhappy "losers" left over.

 consider this, if you set the bar for minimal hashing at 95% a large miner or pool can single handedly veto the change and ruin it for everyone else, in which case it's likely that the network would simply go ahead with the change anyway. 95% is ideal but not a good minimal limit.

75% is best because:

1) winning all the votes isnt easy.
2) 75% indicates that the BIP is somehow superior, to the other perfectly valid BIPs.
3) what individual miners want doesn't matter. in the end miners will mine the most popular chain, because $_$
4) 25% wouldn't be able to do any serious damage to new chain even if they ALL worked together to try and break BTC ( this highly unlikely, most will just accept the new chain and be thankful they got a chance to vote )
5) 75% is high enough to make sure the BIP by and large addresses most people's concerns, it wouldn't be easy to get 75%, its likely the BIP would have the make some changes along the way to TRY and accommodate everyone.
6) Assuming the other BIPs have merit too, and it's not that the other miners necessarily disagree with that BIP but would rather another BIP win all the votes. >75% all agreeing to one thing is hard! and its unlikely all losing miners would turn on the network in anger... I don't go causing a riot when a gov election wins with a minority vote.
if all BIPs were all equally good you'd expect the voting to reflect that.
having 75% pretty much guarantees that that BIP is some how superior

that's why everyone needs to agree, 75% is pretty damn good. 80% is good, 90%+ is a no brainer implement the change right away! 100% = the change has been fully accepted by the network.

could take a while to convince everyone to change their vote to 75%.. 75-85% is a thoughtfully answers... it's a tough question.

Voted 75% because:

1) The children
2) I have no objections to 75%
3) I have no horse in the race.
4) To show how easy votes can be manipulated

So basicly... I voted for a small chance of someone else donating a bit to a good cause. Now I can feel so good about myself.

Could someone with a few dozen sock puppets join in on the vote? Think about the children!

Please everyone Change your votes to 75% so i can make a donation!
besides you have no objections to 75% it's a valid answer, most popular, and happens to be the RIGHT answer!

More proposed modifications:

Perhaps the consensus would have to be maintained for 48 hours, and the probability of reward would be based on the actual percentage reached in the end rather than the percentage agreed upon.

For instance if 100% consensus results in 100% chance of reward, 90% consensus results in 80% chance of reward, and 75% consensus results in 60% chance of reward and:

The 75% option reaches a consensus of over 90% after a 48 hour period, then the chance of reward will be based on the actual consensus reached which was 90%, even though 75% was the proposal that achieved that consensus. The main point of the experiment would then be to see what the actual level of consensus reached is in the end, rather than to see what is voted in.

Another thing I think would be required in an ideal experiment of this kind is that all participants remain actively involved rather than voting once and leaving never to return, though I don't think there is a way to deal with that problem so we will just have to chalk it up as an uncontrollable variable in the results.

If a BIP is going to create a fork, then you need much more than 75% to be on the safe side, since those who commands 25% of the hash power might control much more resources than those who have 75% of hash power

IMO, hash power is just a too simplified indicator, the weight of the vote should be based on a weighted index of many different aspects of the whole ecosystem

There are many important actors in bitcoin ecosystem: devs, full nodes, miners, pools, exchanges, payment processor, wallet providers, and many companies trying to build service upon bitcoins, and investors who have bought lots of coins. Many of them don't have hash power thus can not vote in a hash power way, but they will all be affected by the change in the protocol

By default the current situation is always 100% consensus, because every participant are using it right now. If you want to move away from it, you really need strong motivations from every one. Only when majority of people think that current situation is unbearable, a change will become consensus

Imagine how the Bitcoin Network could be used to resolve the Climate Change debate. There is obvious consensus that Climate Change is caused by human intervention, yet no one trusts the consensus has actually be reached because there are "merchants of doubt" that are essentially scientist shills for the oil companies that shout very loudly and give the impression that there is controversy when there is none or very little.

The Bitcoin Network could easily demonstrate consensus in a indisputable manner, but the question is, how could something like this be achieved? Would you simply ask the miners to vote with their blocks? What do bitcoin miners know about Climate change and why is it their job to make the decision and arrive at consensus?

The same fundamental problem is the one we currently face. We have a very good method for arriving at consensus, the problem is not everybody is allowed to play in the game. ONly the miners seemingly have the votes. How we do all get our voices heard? Do we vote with our bitcoins? This is possible, but then whoever owns the most bitcoins has the most votes…

I think this is an important problem that needs solving.

that really depends,
what if those 25% Mostly represent poeple that doesnt mind of bitcoin is 2MB+17%/yr or 8MB+22%/yr
they made the less popular vote but still would not be hostile to the other option.
suddenly 75% = Safe to Implement.

 and that is probably the case with BIP101 Vs BIP100

i personally do not mind if bitcoin is BIP101, BIP100, if it was up to me i'd pick BIP420, but BIP100 is easy to agree to.

say there is a new BIP,
3 BIPs
dev say hey lets ask the miners again
everyone votes,
votes are: 31% 31% 32%
devs say "fuck it lets go with BIP100"
they all agree " fine lets go with it"
the change is implemented
price goes up
miners are happy.
everyone is happy!

so it really depends

75% is wonderful.

if your vote is not 75% you answered the question incorrectly, please try again.  ;)

This scenario would not be a "consensus decision" it would be a centralized decision made by the developers. Following the Consensus Decision Making model a result of 31% 31% 32% would indicate that amendments and modifications are required before a decision can be made. Implementing a decision without consensus would be the result of not allowing the consensus process to work.

Consider this from Peter Todd in 2013 in regards to the BIP66 fork:

100% and only 100% is true consensus.

but when you talk about miners voting on one of many BIPs we can't actually expect them to reach 95% or 100%

all the BIPs have pros and cons, there is no RIGHT or WRONG answer, its just opinions...

once the change is made and everyone updates, its fact, bitcoin is exactly THIS, everyone agrees and we have "consensus"...

I don't think we can call 75% consensus. That's more like 50% or so + a lucky streak. I believe consensus is basically paramount to virtually all other concerns in regard to the protocol. And that certainly includes a contentious debate about block size.

I concur -- 90%.

91% of the poeple disagree with you.

so in by your very definition we have reached consensus that 90% can't be considered the threshold

HA put that in your pipe and smoke it  :D

wait no thats the 95% option that has 91% of the poeple disagree with. never mind whatever 75% all the way

another 90%er checking in.

I changed back to 90% too. Do you think instead of the traditional 75% supermajority and then 95% consensus it would be beneficial to change it to 75% majority and then 90% consensus? 95% has worked every time so far...

I suppose this should be read as 75% vs. > 75%, since that is the threshold required to proceed with the BIP 101 hard fork. In that regard, the tally is currently 56% in favor of > 75% vs. 44% in favor of 75%. These polls can be easily gamed, I know. :P

Nevertheless, it does seem there is some opposition to the idea of allowing a hard fork to proceed with as little as 75% network consensus.

If you set the vote limit at 75%, then once you reach that limit you have 100% consensus. The 25% can fork off and die; else join the 100% consenting group. 

Finally someone that gets it.

A consensus protocol like bitcoin is ALWAYS 100% of the participants.  That's what consensus means.

If the fork triggers at 5%, you'll still have 100% consensus of the participants.  You'll just have it with a very insecure system since you won't have enough hash power to keep your blockchain secure against an attack.

This is the reason that 75% of the blocks (not 75% of the miners, and not 75% of the nodes) was chosen.  The miners aren't "voting".  They are simply stating that they are willing to use their hash power to secure the blockchain.  Once it is clear that there is enough hash power behind the idea, it becomes "safe" to split off.  The remaining hash power is welcome to continue to support their old blockchain if they want to, but they'll be supporting a relatively insecure system.

Pretty much every altcoin is just a fork of bitcoin that just happens to trigger at the genesis block.  This means that bitcoin already has less than 100% of the "vote" of all crypto-currency participants.  What percentage does it have?  Does it matter?  All that matters is that it has enough hash power to remain secure.  If a hard fork is implemented and less than 100% of the current miners choose to participate, then there will be two bitcoin systems.  One of them will be more secure than the other.  How much more secure will depend on the exact distribution of hash power between them.

They might both choose to call themselves "bitcoin" (which will lead to some confusion with the users) or they may choose to change their name to clear up some of that confusion.  Perhaps the old protocol will change to "LegacyBitcoin"  or perhaps the new protocol will change to "Bitcoin2016".  That's really up to the users to decide.

If there are 3 perfectly valid BIPs and one of them gets 90% hashing power it's a no brainer, that BIP is somehow far superior.

90% is idealy
75% is a threshold

if we could get all the 90%'ters to switch their vote i could donate some BTC...

if you still not convinced about 75% read this, or read the thread.


 
90%'ter argument is basicly "i'm scared that 2 forks will be created"

but are they necessarily saying that they wouldn't secure the blockchain should there BIP they are supporting lose?

probably not...

probably they are expressing a preference.

There is no prospect of an agreement on this survey.

What next? This will just get kicked down the road until there is some urgency.

Perhaps, someone will fork this thread? In fact, if you don't agree on an outcome within the next 8 days, I will fork the thread to an XAdam Experiment and the children will get their donation - 75% will be the only survey choice.

I will also cover the non-XAdam Experiment thread option - but that will not have a survey  :P

its likely poeple will vote for BIP101 while not being opposed to BIP100, they simply prefer BIP101, but will  happily update to BIP100 onces the decision has been made. 90% doesn't allow for miners to vote for their preference, it forces them to vote for what they think everyone else will vote for.

i will donate 10BTC should the poll report 90% for one option

To the children of this forum or those in greater need?

Gold never changes in thousands of years. If bitcoin is to become the new digital gold, it should have similar properties: Immune to human's influence

Basically the bitcoin's fundamental principles are all set, so in principle any BIP should be rejected unless reaching 100% consensus. If bitcoin really have some problem, then consensus will reach to improve it

gold can't change, bitcoin can, its a feature not a bug. I agree no change shouldn't be made lightly,  but it's unrealistic to think bitcoin can't improve and should not. maybe in 10 years everything will be fully ironed out and there will literally be no point in ever changing anything, then again at that point we might want to enable the scripting language bitcoin was designed to handle. and then open up the door to all kinds of possible improvements in the scripting language.

yes but then bitcoin should still be classed as beta, and blockchain reset when it comes out of beta.

reset the blockchain
http://s4.postimage.org/3x9k8vbqt/meme_lol.png
no.

and, do we have windowsBeta or windows95,NT,XP,7,10???

I think this experiment was a complete success in proving that you can achieve dissensus (http://"http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/dissensus") without too much effort. ;)

If you group the votes in 90% or up and less than 90% you get an almost perfect 50-50 split at the moment :D