Hi everyone, I have never posted to the list and do not commit the project
proper
so I do apologize if this is not even possible in advance.
Examining
bitcoin's past and contrasting it with other social contracts and even
physical phenomena it would seem that as bitcoin continues to age
entropy will continue to grow.
The scaling debate would seem to be a fore-bearer of this.
One
main contributor to this in bitcoin is as people/businesses become
involved and vested into their perspective it becomes minted in their
identity. The idea that this will somehow decrease as the user base
grows with more perspectives and use-cases seems counter-intuitive so I
propose a potential way to combat entropy in a divided community.
Diminishing Signaling Returns
Since
entropy is the increase of disorder in a system (the various scaling
solutions for this idea) and measuring via resource is not trustless, we
need a mechanism to essentially counteract entropy while not relying on
game-able metrics.
What if we applied a rate of diminishing returns on signaling in BIP9? Something along the lines of:
Every (X) block signaled The actual signal value diminishes from a 1 signal 1 block to a fraction of a signal per block found after a burn in period of some reasonable time to ensure a majority upgrade(this could even be effected after the timeout currently apart of BIP9 for ease of implementation?).
Some thoughts
- The
pools that find more blocks would lose the ability to block the
network without taking an economical hit splitting up their hash power
as signaling was never intended to be a voting mechanism (to my
knowledge).
- The longer that the signaling took place would eventually run a larger pool's signaling influence to 0 first. This creates a balancing effect between hash rate & #of miners actually signaling ready.
- Gamesmanship
of this system would be visible to the community at large. e.g. pools
hash rate/blocks found jumps or declines significantly in a short time
frame, or specific time frame (when pools influence begins to decline).
- creates multiple economic incentives for the mining community to be on a similar page
- this as a feature of a soft forks greatly diminishes politics becoming a factor in the future.
unfortunately, this itself would require a soft fork if I am correct?