In a recent blog post, Peter Todd, one of the more active bitcoin developers, raised the prospects of an amicable end to the so-called “civil war”. Setting out a condition, Todd states:
“If major industry players were willing to commit to layer 2 solutions, I’d be willing to support something like a forced soft fork, and I’d be willing to support a coin voting hard fork even if they didn’t.”
A forced-soft-fork is similar to an ordinary soft fork, but unupgraded clients won’t be able to spend their funds until they upgrade. However, in an email response, Todd states: “[F]orced-soft-forks raise serious questions about the control miners have over Bitcoin; accepting them as a mechanism is sending a very dangerous message.” Coin Voting is a mechanism proposed a month ago at the Satoshi Roundtable. It allows bitcoin users to indicate “in transactions themselves that they are both ready, and approve of, an upcoming hard-fork.” We asked whether it would not be far too easy to game coin voting by simply endlessly moving bitcoins around:
“No, because the proposed voting is based on coin-days-destroyed. Basically if you have 1BTC for 1 day, whether you spend that BTC in one transaction or twenty, it counts for 1BTC*day worth of coin-days-destroyed, and thus has equal weight in the voting scheme.” Lightning and Segwit
Lightning has been proposed as a solution to bitcoin’s scalability. Initially designed for micropayments, it may decrease blockspace demand as lower value transactions, approximately 70,000 daily with a value of less than $5 according to Rusty Russell, may use the Lightning Network instead of bitcoin’s blockchain. In the post Todd states:
“[I]f major industry players were willing to make a clear and credible commitment to layer 2 solutions like Lightning that have genuine scaling, without compromising on decentralization, I think it’d be […]
