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Date: Wed, 03 Mar 2021 17:30:20 +0000
From: yanmaani@cock.li
To: Chris Belcher <belcher@riseup.net>, Bitcoin Protocol Discussion
 <bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org>
In-Reply-To: <3286a7eb-9deb-77d6-4527-58e0c5882ae2@riseup.net>
References: <3286a7eb-9deb-77d6-4527-58e0c5882ae2@riseup.net>
Message-ID: <85745a38e4464541d6357408fae1cfed@cock.li>
User-Agent: Roundcube Webmail/1.3.15
Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] Making the case for flag day activation of taproot
Precedence: list

On 2021-03-03 14:39, Chris Belcher via bitcoin-dev wrote:
> Enter flag day activation. With a flag day there can be no
> brinksmanship. A social media blitz cant do anything except have its 
> own
> followers fork away. Crucially, miner signalling cant be used to change
> the activation date for nodes that didn't choose to and just passively
> follow signalling. Changing the activation date requires all those 
> users
> to actually run different node software.

Is that supposed to be a good thing? "We should do X because it'll work" 
doesn't prove X is actually good. These things can be evil, but they can 
also be legitimate opposition to a change. Taking away the power of a 
"social media blitz" is not guaranteed to be a good thing!

> What if one day the Core developer team uses the flag
> day method to do something bad? The bitcoin user
> community who wants to resist this can create their own
> counter-soft-fork full node. This forces a chain
> split. The real bitcoin which most people follow will be
> the chain without censorship.

[edited for brevity]

That will only work for really egregious changes. In practice, most 
people will trust Core on all other (non-egregious) decisions, because 
of the inertia inherent in disobeying them.

What you suggest may be an efficient way to ram taproot through, but is 
it inherently good? Nothing is free. This seems like de-facto forcing 
people to go along with you, because you're convinced you're right. In 
this case, you are, but you'd be convinced you'd be right even if you 
weren't so.

You're right in suggesting that it will work, but the reason why it will 
work is because nobody wants to disobey Core. It seems immoral to 
exploit this fact.

At least you shouldn't hard-code it and require dissenters to fork away. 
I exhort you to consider making all this controversial stuff settings 
that can be changed by RPC command or command-line flag; set the default 
value sure, but requiring a fork to change it is, in my opinion, 
oppressive.

(Also consider some compromise, such as ">95% miner support before flag 
day or >33% on flag day")

Best wishes
Yanmaani