Re: [bitcoin-dev] Moving towards user activated soft fork activation

[Edmund Edgar <ed@realitykeys.com>]

On 7 March 2017 at 08:23, Gareth Williams <gjw@posteo.net> wrote:
> What you're describing is a hashpower activated soft fork to censor transactions, in response to a user activated soft fork that the majority of hashpower disagrees with.

Well, they'd be censoring transactions to prevent the thing from
activating in the first place. (As opposed to censoring a subset of
those transactions to enforce the new rule, which is the behaviour
that the people promoting the change want.) There would be no point at
which people reasonably expected that something useful would happen if
they sent funds to an address protected by the new scripting rule.

> Bitcoin only works if the majority of hashpower is not hostile to the users.

This is true. But what we're talking about here is hostility to *a
particular proposal to change the network rules* which is (in this
hypothetical case) supported by the economic majority of users. This
doesn't, in itself, break Bitcoin, although the economic majority are
of course always free to hard-fork to something new if they're
unhappy.

Edmund

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Edmund Edgar
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