A New Bitcoin Improvement Proposal Aims to Compromise

By Jamie Redman 

As the price of bitcoin settles down many bitcoiners are now concentrating on the scaling compromise proposed at the Consensus event held last week. Now a few bitcoin developers have decided to work on Segwit-2MB proposals that try to adhere to each side of the debate.

The Compatibility-Oriented Omnibus Proposal

A New Bitcoin Improvement Proposal Aims to Compromise It is still hard to envision that everyone in the bitcoin community will be pleased with a compromise. There are still some bitcoin proponents who vehemently oppose Segwit, and then there are those who fully disagree with a 2MB hardfork. On May 29 a developer named Calvin Rechner submitted a new bitcoin improvement proposal (BIP) that aims to cohere to the recent Barry Silbert scaling concept.

“This proposal is written under the assumption that the signatories to the Consensus 2017 Scaling Agreement are genuinely committed to the terms of the agreement, and intend to enact the updates described therein,” Rechner’s BIP details.

This document describes a virtuous combination of James Hilliard’s ‘Reduced signalling threshold activation of existing segwit deployment’, Shaolin Fry’s ‘Mandatory activation of segwit deployment’, Sergio Demian Lerner’s ‘Segwit2Mb’ proposal, Luke Jr’s ‘Post-segwit 2 MB block size hardfork’, and hard fork safety mechanisms from Johnson Lau’s ‘Spoonnet’ into a single omnibus proposal and patchset.

UASF and a 2MB Hard Fork Deployment in Six Months

Rechner explains that Shaolin Fry’s UASF is included so the existing Segwit deployment can be activated without creating a new release. Following the UASF implementation, the BIP explains that a 2MB hard fork deployment will occur six months after Segwit activation.

“The intent of this proposal is to maintain full legacy consensus compatibility for users up until the hard fork block height, after which backwards compatibility is waived as enforcement of the hard fork consensus ruleset begins,” details Rechner.

‘A Possible Win if the Community Will Accept It’

Following Rechner’s BIP submission, bitcoiners on social media and forums discussed the recent proposal. Throughout the conversations concerning the new BIP, a good portion of people seemed to like the idea. Some explained the reason they supported this proposal is because it includes UASF and the block size increase has safety nets in place to avoid divergent consensus.

“The Spoonnet-based improvements need clarification IMO, but otherwise it looks like a possible win if the community will accept it,” explains bitcoin developer Luke Jr. “Provided there is reasonable consensus from the community, a soft-hardfork (aka MMHF aka Spoonnet) can be theoretically made pretty safe. But I’m not sure it can really be ready within six months.”

Even though there still seems to be a lot of people hell bent towards not compromising at all, there are definitely signs of people looking to find the right compromise. It’s not certain this new BIP will be taken further, but it shows the growing trend to find consensus is important to most people from both sides of the debate.

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