Bitcoin's elegant upgrade mechanism: miner voting

Most of the debate so far has been focused on written proposals, meetings, signed letters, and Twitter shouting matches, but don't forget that Bitcoin already has a built-in upgrade mechanism with an elegant design. If a majority of Bitcoin miners "vote" for a particular upgrade, then, as the name implies, it's a new version of Bitcoin. Each miner gets a number of votes proportional to the amount of hashing power they put into the network (so the votes can't be faked). These votes can be generated at any time, and you can watch them slowly change in real time.

To me, this is one of the most outstanding features of Bitcoin. It ensures that Bitcoin can evolve over time and cannot be controlled or hindered by any one party. (If you compare this to how other protocols like HTTP or IP have improved, this feels like a huge improvement).

Some people seem to have forgotten that this mechanism exists, preferring instead to resort to design by committee and endless debate. Fortunately, we’ve recently seen a situation emerge with some of the Bitcoin forks: people are starting to experiment with forks and vote on them (if you’re a Bitcoin miner).

The problem we are seeing right now is that in elections in the Bitcoin community, as in all elections (the US presidential race is a classic example), things can get a little too heated even if they are part of the normal process.

Despite this potential pitfall, I believe Bitcoin’s upgrade mechanism still works and that we should embrace voting on hard forks (rather than waiting for consensus around the current Bitcoin Core). Let’s look at why.

Would this be a bad thing that would divide the Bitcoin community?

Not really. Would it be better if there was only one political party in a country? If there was only one smartphone manufacturer?

Competition is a huge driving force for progress.

In the United States, we elect a president every four years. Would it be better if a president stayed in office forever and we had to try to change his mind about what was important to us?

If politics isn't a good example for you, think about the free market. We see competing forks emerge in Bitcoin just like we have competing products to choose from (whether it's Android vs. iOS, Tesla vs. BMW, or the Italian restaurant in your hometown). Each Bitcoin fork is like a small company competing for your business (with its own team, product, CEO, and track record). Miners vote with their hash power, not with your money.

The emergence of competitive forks in Bitcoin is a sign of the health of the ecosystem. As in a free market, even if competitors are unsuccessful in taking market share from an incumbent, competition is still a sufficient threat to keep the incumbent from improving.

But hard forks are dangerous — won’t they split Bitcoin in two and cause people to lose their Bitcoin?

I don't think so.

Yes, hard forks create some overhead (some companies and individuals will have to upgrade their backend software), so we probably shouldn’t have hard forks every month. But if they only happen every few years (as in the political election analogy), that’s probably a good thing overall.

Many recent proposals are based on a design where each mined block comes with a vote, but nothing changes unless a supermajority is reached. This makes it possible for wallet providers (or other Bitcoin service providers) to easily upgrade and have certain features automatically switched when a majority is reached. This is actually quite convenient.

I have yet to see a fork that "breaks" Bitcoin or prevents Bitcoin from being used on another fork, so I think there is no basis for this (any fork with these properties is unlikely to win the required votes).

In reality, most end users will not even notice a hard fork has occurred because their software vendors will handle the corresponding upgrades in the background.

Likewise, truly surpassing hash power with a competing fork is unlikely for a long time. Once a competing fork gets 51% or more of hash power, I think the remaining miners will flee the losing fork. This will probably happen in a matter of hours, not days or weeks. Miners may be divided in terms of the number of votes assigned to them per block, but miners will not be denied block rewards solely because of their hash power unless their blocks end up on the longest chain.

In this way, Bitcoin will be a little different than Android vs. iOS. You will see a huge amount of hash power on a single fork, even if miners are split by vote.

Clearly, in Bitcoin, some people are unwilling to accept free market competition (hard forks) and prefer a central planning committee. If you support decentralization, you should support competitive hard forks in Bitcoin. They are the best mechanism if we must ensure that Bitcoin continues to evolve and is not controlled or hindered by any one party.

Isn't it necessary to have broad consensus before making major changes?

Yes and no.

Think of the different Bitcoin forks as companies competing to do your business. Many changes are widely agreed upon among these companies (e.g., the next iPhone should have a faster processor), but not all decisions are so simple (should we make the next iPhone thinner or give it longer battery life?).

When a team disagrees on an issue, things become a logjam and stop moving forward. Should the company stop functioning until everyone is on the same page? Of course not. Some decisions will never get full consensus (some won't even get 50% if there are three or more choices). That's why companies have a chain of command that includes various decision makers at different levels (from the bottom up to the CEO) - to break the logjam. If your company stops moving forward at any point, it's because there's disagreement, and you'll soon be outpaced by competitors who make more efficient decisions.

It turns out that it’s usually better to make any decision (even the wrong one) rather than no decision. You may never know the right solution until you try it. Action generates information. Or, as General George Patton said, “A good plan executed madly today is better than a perfect plan tomorrow.”

This is also why one of the slogans in the IETF (the standards body used for the TCP/IP network protocols) is "rough consensus, living code".

They know the value of running fast, as 100% of people rarely agree on anything (i.e. everyone has a different opinion). This is probably even more important to them, as they don’t have a built-in voting mechanism like Bitcoin does.

Should we stick to Bitcoin Core?

We certainly can. They are one of the forks we can vote on. I think the Bitcoin Core team is made up of very talented people (many of whom are smarter than I am) who are truly committed to Bitcoin. If any of them left, we would be worse off.

My goal here is not to offer any opinion for or against the current Bitcoin Core team. I am simply saying that, overall, competitive forks in Bitcoin are a good thing.

The team behind each fork is just as important as the changes they intend to make, as I believe block size is just one of many changes that will take years for the right team (and leaders) to decide on.

We should be more focused on voting for the right teams and decision-making frameworks rather than the hot issues about buttons right now.

What if miners don’t want to vote?

My understanding from the Scaling Bitcoin conference (which was also attended by Charlie Lee from Coinbase) is that many miners have expressed no desire to vote.

I was a little surprised to hear this rather negative view, because in my opinion, miners are important to the Bitcoin election process. Many people like to vote on issues. How come miners are giving up their votes?

I suspect the underlying reason for this is that they do not want to disrupt the current situation or hurt the price of Bitcoin. There are two countervailing forces balancing: (1) the hard fork will likely be misinterpreted by the media as a controversy or crisis, driving the price of Bitcoin down in the short term; (2) finding a way to scale Bitcoin to the level of PayPal or Visa transactions will drive the price of Bitcoin up in the long term.

Miners were all linked together as a whole, which would be a much greater risk (or perhaps there is some other aversion to the process that I'm not aware of).

Whether they want to or not now, miners are worthless if they just vote for the version of software they run. Every time a block is mined, it has a tag attached to it that votes for a specific version of the software.

I want to propose a new way to think about how to weigh votes when only explicit votes are counted. Right now, default blocks are counted as a vote for Bitcoin Core, but that means miners either didn’t have a chance to upgrade or they didn’t want to vote (as they say).

We should give miners the choice if they want to explicitly vote for Bitcoin Core, or abstain and not vote.

Someone once asked if Bitcoin needs a governance model. To that, I say we already have one. I think competitive forks with hash-power-based voting are a brilliant innovation that fits well with the idea of ​​Bitcoin. We shouldn’t always need to use it, but it is a valuable tool to secure Bitcoin’s future. Voting is far better for us than endless debates in the hope of consensus. Once the world sees this elegant feature of Bitcoin as its strength, not its weakness, it will help the price of Bitcoin rise over time.

in conclusion

When these elections happen, people will be excited to see this progress on Bitcoin. I think over time people will start to become less concerned about the idea of ​​hard forks, recognizing that they are part of the health of Bitcoin when used in moderation.

I hope that in the coming months of 2016 we’ll see an increase in the number of miners voting on the proposal and getting it implemented, and then we can move on to other potential upgrades – blocksize being the first.

You can follow the elections here and here to see how different forks perform (both in terms of running nodes and being stronger in terms of blocks mined). Hopefully we'll see explicit tickets attached to every block in the future.

Update: I've slightly changed my mind about how voting works. Miners have one vote as do other actors in the ecosystem. It's more complicated than "just miners". Thanks!

Original article: https://medium.com/@barmstrong/bitcoin-s-elegant-upgrade-mechanism-miner-voting-66faa35d27af#.dus3p69ww
By Brian Armstrong
Translator: Peterhon
Reward address: 16V6PW9wu1pFVb1R3LiGJKEwZAFHu9MMtA
Editor: printemps
Source (translation): Babbitt Information (http://www.8btc.com/bitcoin-elegant-upgrade)