Bitcoin Forum

How would the Bitcoin activate Schnorr Signatures, Erlay, Taproot, and other soft forks to improve the network, if the miners "play politics" again?

8)

i don't think there is any drama left to be had. the main drama was when the decision was being made whether to just bump the block size up or add SegWit or both.
the future improvements you mentioned here, as far as i can tell, are going to be implemented as a new SegWit version. we are currently at version zero so Schnorr for instance can be version 1. and i suppose it would be a much smoother soft fork than what we had in 2017.
of course we can not really predict these things!

Segwit threatened the ability for Bitmain or others to use covert ASICBOOST. I also think large miners favored establishing big block precedent (vs. Segwit) because they were putting short term rational interests above long term network health. They perceived cheap fees as a quick ticket to mass adoption. They also knew the increased orphaning risk of big blocks would hurt smaller miners more and help them consolidate hash rate share.

These upgrades don't seem nearly as contentious for miners. Why would they be opposed to signature aggregation, or bandwidth savings, or smart contract capability?

You are both partly correct. But what's our answer if we, the users/economic majority, want those improvements, but the miners don't? 8)

A UASF like BIP148 that orphans non-compliant blocks is always possible, but I sure hope it isn't so rushed next time around. If we want to force miners to enforce a soft fork, we need to maximize user node enforcement. That means allowing as much time as possible for people to upgrade before the fork. 6 months at least, or maybe a year might be a more reasonable time period to allow users to upgrade.

How sure are we that miners will again "play politics"? They are after all, many voices and I'm not sure they could get behind one voice any more. All other things equal, there shouldn't be too much negatives to the new upgrades. Privacy especially, should get far less resistance than scalability.

One game at a time.

I think the 2017 showdown was a real blow to the egos of large miners. They thought they could flex their hashpower and change the protocol with backroom deals, and they ended up looking like impotent fools because of it. Their NYA deal flopped, they caved to BIP148, and most of them know better now than to pit themselves against the community.

I don't know. After UASF, I believe they would not try to block improvements that the users/economic majority want anymore.

But if they play that game again, you know what to do. 8)