By the way, on that basis it might be a good idea to introduce an extra status called "deployed" to indicate when a hard fork has reached a super-majority and is being used by the economy in practice, but not the whole economy.

On 10/03/16 16:28, Mustafa Al-Bassam wrote:

On 10/03/16 15:59, Jorge Timón wrote:

On Mar 10, 2016 16:51, "Mustafa Al-Bassam via bitcoin-dev" <bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org> wrote:

> I think in general this sounds like a good definition for a hard-fork
> becoming active. But I can envision a situation where someone will try
> to be annoying about it and point to one instance of one buyer and one
> seller using the blockchain to buy and sell from each other, or set one up.

And all the attacker will achieve is preventing a field on a text file on github from moving from "active" to "final".
Seems pretty stupid. Why would an attacker care so much about this? Is there any way the attacker can make gains or harm bitcoin with this attack?

It's extremely naive to think that just because you can't think of an incentive for a reason for an attack to do this, an attacker will never to do this. There are many people that would be willing to spend some time to cause some trouble for the enjoyment of it, if the attack is free to execute.

The fact that it takes very little time and effort to prevent a BIP from reaching final status, means that in an base of millions of users it's guaranteed that some disgruntled or bored person out there will attack it, even if it's for the lulz.

To reasonably expect that any hark fork - including an uncontroversial one - will be adapted by every single person in a ecosystem of millions of people, is wishful thinking and the BIP may as well say "hard fork BIPs shall never reach final status."