Amid the Bitcoin block size debate, an anomymous developer recently talked about a project related to a new solution called UASF or user-activated soft fork.
Many in the community are skeptical about this proposal, but there are enough circumstantial evidences to back it up, and a new movement is growing in the hopes of pushing through the change that miners are now being accused of blocking.
Usually, miners are tasked with pushing through a similar fix. But some in the bitcoin community are calling for a different (and older) method of making a change to bitcoin based on support of the known “economic majority”, instead of miner support.
Coinkite founder Rodolfo Novak, an advocate for this new born movement, explained that it aims at correcting perceived inequities that used to dominate the scaling debate.
“Miners trying to centralize bitcoin is an unacceptable thing. It goes against what bitcoin is supposed to be. This UASF is really like saying, ‘No, we control bitcoin, not you.'”
However, UASF-related support seems to be increasing.
Even if the code is not safe yet, a few users are now supporting it with their nodes.
Node support for this change has grown to 4.8%, or by about six times.
“On a technical level, signaling it that way does absolutely nothing, it does however help the case on a social level and prevents users from running an outdated version of the code when enforcing starts,” developer Damian Mee commented.
Due to UASF system, it might be necessary to have an explicit support from the “economic majority,” or exchanges, wallets, and other bitcoin players.
This support is so far at about 6% since the BIP was put out on March 12th.
However, a sizable percentage of bitcoin nodes are running Bitcoin Core, and SegWit, which Mee thinks is a good indicator that the so-called “economic majority” supports SegWit, and the UASF version.
The code is backwards-compatible, so the 80% of nodes that are now ready for SegWit.
That said, we have to tell that the code implementation hasn’t already fully tested or reviewed.
The original activation for SegWit was put at October 1st, 2017, but recently it was moved to August 1st.
Updates: UASF proposal has been changed. Click here to read more about it.
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