Bitcoin Forum

"A UASF could be enforced by any number of economic nodes, although
hash power may only choose to follow such rules if there was
significant economic weight behind it." Source: http://www.uasf.co/

Does this mean: If the "Majority of the Exchange Volume" votes for UASF, then Miners have to follow?

What means this "significant economic weight" exactly and how are the chances that these thresholds are reached?


Thanks,

Bitone

Consider this situation if UASF occurs:

The majority of hash rate is non segwit, and they will start to create the longest chain. Non upgraded nodes follow this longest chain.
UASF nodes will split when the first segwit block is mined. They will then only accept blocks built on this chain, even if it is not the longest.

We now have a chain split.

If the economic players (major exchanges, bitcoin payment services, etc..) are on the segwit chain, the bitcoin mined on the longest chain is useless in an economic sense.

So the idea is this will then cause miners to switch to the segwit chain as this is where the economic activity is. Then the segwit chain becomes the longest chain and the old chain is orphaned.

If miners are only thinking of short term profits, this is what they will be forced to do.

But, what if the miners are willing to play a long term game?

So what happens if the miners have a significant majority of hash power and are vehemently opposed to segwit, or the team which is trying to control the development of the protocol?

They use enough hash power to ensure the original chain is the longest.

They use their remaining hash power to attack the segwit chain. This can be done in a number of ways, for example:
1. Mining empty blocks making the segwit chain economic useless.
2. Getting lucky by chaining empty blocks and releasing them orphaning genuinely mined segwit blocks which have transactions in them, yet again making the segwit chain economically useless.

In this case, the economic players (exchanges, payment services, etc.) declare the segwit chain dead and downgrade so they are back on the original chain.

Note, in this case we are not on a 'BU' chain, just the original bitcoin chain without segwit.

But what happens if the economic players decide to play a long term stance against the miners? This is where things will start to get really ugly.

Can anyone check the validity of my assertions so far?

http://www.uasf.co/

in short, if bip9 dosnt get 95%, if UASF doesnt help to get segwit activated. they will ignore the fact that majority is not reached. and just try again wasting another year trying.

on thing the devs wont do before 2019 is to take a step back and listen to the community and actually do a proper consensus that includes more features to make the community happy

So are they suffering from Einstein's definition of insanity?

Fixed it for them.  ;)

not really.

more so beat with a stick until people give in

You're right. I believe Einstein defined insanity has trying the same thing again and again hoping to get a different result. That is different to trying different techniques to try and enforce your will on a system.

Well I believe you are correct that a chain split will indeed occur if the longest PoW chain
doesn't support segwit.  The outputs from the new transaction types won't be recognized
by the legacy chain and therefore, any blocks mined with subsequent transactions using
those outputs may not validate.  The 'backwards compatibility' of segwit only means your
wallet won't stop working just because you're not using the new transaction types, or
if you're a minority miner, you can still mine blocks with non segwit transactions,
but the block will always be on top of the longest chain.

The idea behind UASF is to persuade/influence/ miners to fork, but
the problem is that anything except hash power is relatively inexpensive
to spoof.  So, this goes against the philosophy of Bitcoin PoW.

I think your thoughts are legit, and that's also why I would like the UASF supporters to try to persuade at least the "indecise group" of miners (F2Pool et al.) to try to reach 55-60% of the hashrate. At least in the case of Segwit, an important and "heavy" upgrade.

In the case of the Asicboost-blocking UASF, I think the majority would be larger, so this UASF could be launched as a "test balloon" for the Segwit UASF. If this UASF goes through, then we'll see if the Bitmain group is still opposed to SW - if yes, then the Asicboost allegations were probably wrong.


How could economic majority be spoofed? Big exchanges, payment processors etc. could even sign a message supporting or opposing an UASF with their largest wallets' private keys.

so then funds could just be moved around... now you're getting into coin age...might as well go to a PoS system.

You guys are just regurgitating what you read from me here (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1863995.msg18537245#msg18537245), here (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1863995.msg18548359#msg18548359), and here (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1863278.msg18543116#msg18543116).

But that is good. At least you're learning.

Now you guys need to learn this (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1857162.msg18537292#msg18537292), this (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1857162.msg18551556#msg18551556), and this (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1857162.msg18554018#msg18554018).

You're making some progress but until you lose the itch to destroy yourselves by ganging up as a MOB, then you will continue to destroy yourselves.

right, but get mostly everyone, bitfinex, stamps, bitpay etc. all supporting USAF, and its not ambiguous and the idea of "spoofing" is a non issue.
its not inconceivable that with a minority hashing power and a minority node count, a UASF is successful and carries with it the BTC brand.

Nonsense. Just a lot more fools who can lose their money. The smart money will sell the USAF minority hashrate fork and buy the majority hashrate fork. Jihan might even temporarily mine on the USAF fork and lie-in-wait, so that the fools sell the legal fork and buy the illegal USAF forkoff, and the smart money will do the opposite. Then Jihan moves his hashrate onto the legal fork and bankrupts all the retards.

Sweet justice in the law of immutable protocol.

---

I wonder what people like Mircea Popescu are thinking about this whole drama right now. You should also factor in people like him and what potential twists they can cause in this whole debacle. I hope he does not go crazy and dump all his BTC to crash it out of frustration.

Hell no. He is doing other things^TM until it is time to take money from those who sell the legal fork and buy the illegal one. He will do the opposite. Its been a while since he did the DAO attack, so about time for some more retard spanking fireworks.

But what happens if the economic players decide to play a long term stance against the miners? This is where things will start to get really ugly.

Eventually each chain will undergo a difficulty adjustment.
Since the segwit chain is deemed as valid to older nodes (even if they can't understand it fully because they are kludged into a trick), when the segwit chain overtakes the original blockchain, a massive chain reorganisation occurs and the segwit chain becomes the valid chain.
Then the miners can split the chain again at the reorganised difficulty level and repeat the process ad inifinitum.

Due to bitcoins long difficulty adjustment times, this leads to an extended period where bitcoin is essentially uselss, as a lot of confirmationed transactions on either chain can be wiped out by miner attack or chain reorganisation at any time.

Since the segwit chain is fighting the original bitcoin chain, the original bitcoin chain can't be told to fork off and stop relaying transactions to the segwit chain. The original bitcoin chain is also being fed transactions from the segwit chain, and can't block them as it has not been designed to do so.

Fortunately the long difficulty adjustment times makes the chances of such a scenario occurring for long unappealing to everybody.

So one exit option is that the UASF is cancelled by economic nodes downgrading. But once the software is released, nobody can force them to do it.

The other option is the the segwit chain starts blacklisting nodes and performs an emergency POW change to stop the miner attacks. Then the original bitcoin chain is still being fed transactions from the segwit chain and needs to take reciprocal action. This becomes a bilateral split. The segwit chain has been fighting the original bitcoin chain, and so loses the brand name by default (or at least should do without human reclassification).

Byzantine generals are leading the charge of the light brigade!

Everything you wrote is incorrect.

Care to explain why?

Actually, I probably need to think about the transaction broadcasting between the split chains more in the case where/if segwit applies the node banning hammer.
Any help would be appreciated.

Since in the contentious case, transaction interplay between the split blockchains would create a complete clusterfuck, this would be a deterrent to a bilateral split*, and exchanges would not be able to list two different coins. They would have to suspend deposits and withdrawals whilst the system is resolved one way or the other.

As this situation is not desirable to anyone in the long term, it would lead to one of the two results I explained earlier in the thread:

1.) The miners will follow the economic majority.
2.) The economic players will follow the mining majority.

In both cases, everyone will eventually unite on one blockchain.

Since the possibility of 1.) exists, this means the bitcoin protocol itself is not immutable. The blockchain record might be immutable, but not the future protocol behaviour.

* As it would be fighting against existing bitcoin protocol behaviour, no one can demand it to change.

You seem like you are always in contact with the guy. Mircea Popescu strikes me as someone who is motivated and moved by his ideals. Your post is saying he is the exact opposite and only cares about making money.


The rumor all point to him but is this confirmed? Do you know what his intentions are with all the ETC he "earned"?

Economic players have no leverage. If they play hardball on the non-majority chain their non braindead competitors will just benefit and they will go bankrupt because of their own obvious stupidity. Merchants exists to give us options, they'll do that if there is a chain split. All the 'UASF ready' BS will do nothing for its success.

iamnotback is WRONG!  ;D
also you too xhiggy...

economic majority is EVERYTHING!
the white paper simply assumes that hashing power would always at least Represent the will of the economic majority, short of being economic majority.
the longest chain is meaningless if its not valid
and the definition of "valid" can and will change.
imagine 85% of the hashing power started to produce empty blocks, all day long forever.
this will severely cripple bitcoins ability to TX, 1 or 2 new rules will be required, somthing like blocks cannot be empty, and blocks must be mostly filled with TX that are in most nodes mempools, or somthing.

in that case a UASF is easily achievable.
and we could very well get in a case where we fork off with minority hashing power and minority node count ( because under sybil attack )
and STILL WIN!

@iamnotback

no i do not give a SHIT if the economic minority throws a hissy fit and manages to bring us cheap coins!!!!! For a short while...

welcome to the blockchain
lets FORK!

i dont believe the idea that bitcoin will become an immutable protocol
i dont buy the bullshit  iamnotback is saying about the "whales"
and you know what i dont even care what the whales think, let them dump on the chain i believe to be valid, and let see how that works out for them.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C7nozfpW4AANWMN.jpg
I WANT TO FORK YOUR MOTHER!!!!!!!!!!

I think you make an interesting point. I doubt there will be any talk of an imminent hard fork now. Segwit has started the next move with UASF, and they will be up against the existing bitcoin protocol.

UASF will be the Charge of the Light Brigade (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charge_of_the_Light_Brigade).

@Killerpotleaf won't know which way to point his horse, as he as smoked too much!