Up to this point, the main way to judge support for a change to Bitcoin’s consensus rules has been miner voting . Miners are able to broadcast support for changes to the Bitcoin protocol via coinbase transactions , and these messages of support are tabulated in an effort to judge the level of support among those who are theoretically incentivized to support the network.
On a recent episode of The Crypto Show , Bitcoin Core contributor Peter Todd discussed the idea of allowing users to vote (or signal support) for hard forks , which is a concept that was heavily discussed at the Satoshi Roundtable in late February. During the interview, Todd summarized why having users vote for changes to Bitcoin’s consensus rules would be an improvement over miner voting:
“Something like coin voting ‒ that could give you much better feedback on what people actually want. Right now, we don’t really have a good way of getting feedback.”
This improved feedback would make hard forks safer because it would give a clearer indication of the level of support for the fork before it is activated. A hard fork without near universal support from users has the potential to create two competing Bitcoin blockchains. Although miner voting is currently available, those votes don’t indicate whether the economic majority will also go along with changes agreed upon by the mining community.
How Can Bitcoin Users Vote for Hard Forks?
Todd noted that this is especially useful during hard forks. Todd explained the basics of how this voting would work:
“As part of the hard fork to increase the block size, part of the conditions for actually triggering this hard fork (in the code to actually say this software is now active) would be that you go vote with your bitcoins.”
Todd also noted that Bitcoin […]
