Who has to agree upon a consensus change?

ranochigo

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Crypto Swap Exchange

Quote from: bitmover on December 31, 2020, 12:55:29 PM

After the pull request has been accepted, I think miners will also need to update their software accordingly. Right?
Miners are the ones who actually decide what the longest chain will be.

If they do not update, new blocks in the longest chain will be following old consensus rules.

The pull requests are usually merged and due to release in a Bitcoin Core version in the future. The rules are not changed that easily, soft forks in particular has to reach a certain threshold of miner's signalling for their readiness to accept the changes before rules are activated. Threshold for soft forks tends to be 95% in the last X blocks (to start rejecting blocks not following rules) and I assume consensus change would require a higher percentage. Segwit had various activation periods before it was finally activated.

Miners will always have the ability to determine the longest chain. The nodes are the ones who decides which chain, no matter the length difficultywise they decide to follow. Miner's support is equally important as any possible forks would result in SPV wallets and/or wallet which are not upgraded/unaware of the new rules to be insecure.

bitmover

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Quote from: NotATether on December 31, 2020, 06:27:08 AM

There isn't a single owner of the bitcoin repository actually, if you go to Github you can see it's actually a Github Organization with most of the active contributors inside. For any PRs that are made affecting the bitcoin client or daemon software, docs etc. these people are the ones who have to come to an agreement on the change.

If the change however is related to the bitcoin network, such as a BIP that is being made or revised/replaced (there's a nice overview of that process here which I will summarize), the bitcoin contributors are only the first line of determining whether a BIP, which is (paraphrasing) submitted to the mailing list first, will be rejected either because it's infeasible or too vague or else move on to the next stage. And that next stage is the amount of acceptance it gets from the community as the result of the BIP being submitted in a pull request. This stage is where e.g. bitcointalkers and r/bitcoin folks can raise their objections and even block the BIP from proceeding. Then the last stage is deployment which depends on the number of node owners and/or miners that decide to implement this BIP by updating their clients and software. Bitcoin Core developers only have full control of the first stage not the other two.

After the pull request has been accepted, I think miners will also need to update their software accordingly. Right?
Miners are the ones who actually decide what the longest chain will be.

If they do not update, new blocks in the longest chain will be following old consensus rules.

NotATether

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bitcoincleanup.com / bitmixlist.org

There isn't a single owner of the bitcoin repository actually, if you go to Github you can see it's actually a Github Organization with most of the active contributors inside. For any PRs that are made affecting the bitcoin client or daemon software, docs etc. these people are the ones who have to come to an agreement on the change.

If the change however is related to the bitcoin network, such as a BIP that is being made or revised/replaced (there's a nice overview of that process here which I will summarize), the bitcoin contributors are only the first line of determining whether a BIP, which is (paraphrasing) submitted to the mailing list first, will be rejected either because it's infeasible or too vague or else move on to the next stage. And that next stage is the amount of acceptance it gets from the community as the result of the BIP being submitted in a pull request. This stage is where e.g. bitcointalkers and r/bitcoin folks can raise their objections and even block the BIP from proceeding. Then the last stage is deployment which depends on the number of node owners and/or miners that decide to implement this BIP by updating their clients and software. Bitcoin Core developers only have full control of the first stage not the other two.

BlackHatCoiner

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Farewell, Leo

I was wondering, if the developers want to change something that is considered important in the code like a consensus rule, who has to agree upon that? I mean, the project on github is owned by someone, if he wants to increase the 21 million coins he can. The problem is that none of the nodes is going to accept it.

But what if in the future, bitcoin.org/github source code's admins/, change a consensus rule. All of these are not owned by the crowd, but from a single entity. Even if nodes do not accept the change, Bitcoin will be messed up. The old version core files will start disappearing from download pages.

On segwit who agreed with who?

Topic: Who has to agree upon a consensus change? (Read 351 times)