Experiment - Achieving consensus where there is disagreement

[adamstgBit]

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.

[BitcoinExchangeIndia.com]

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

People can not take decission on scattered information.

[adamstgBit]

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.

[coins101]

Simple but clear majority seems to be the consensus point.

[adamstgBit]

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%

[knight22]

Interesting. Let see how it goes.

[coins101]

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%

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.

[adamstgBit]

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%

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.

[ihaveaquestion]

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.

[coins101]

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%

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.

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

[johnyj]

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

[adamstgBit]

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"

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

[Hazir]

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"

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.

[coins101]

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

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

[johnyj]

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"

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

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

[adamstgBit]

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

[solex]

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%

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.

[BitProdigy]

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%

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!

[BitProdigy]

To encourage people to change their vote, I pledge to donate 50,000 bits (0.05 BTC) to https://worldaid.org/donate-bitcoin-for-charity/ if 90% consensus can be reached for any one option for over 12 hours!

[BitProdigy]

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!