From 9a81f01a3db13c9d2f1f93ba79dd78144df4273c Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: =?UTF-8?q?Jorge=20Tim=C3=B3n?= <jtimon@jtimon.cc>
Date: Sat, 20 Jun 2015 23:10:46 +0200
Subject: Add BIP99 for consensus rule changes deployment

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+<pre>
+  BIP: 99
+  Title: Motivation and deployment of consensus rule changes ([soft/hard]forks)
+  Author: Jorge Timón jtimon@jtimon.cc
+  Status: Draft
+  Type: Informational | Process
+  Created: 2015-06-20
+  Post-History: http://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2015-June/008936.html
+</pre>
+
+==Abstract==
+
+This BIP attempts to create a taxonomy of the different types of
+consensus forks and proposes a deployment mechanism for each of them.
+
+==Motivation==
+
+The security assumptions of p2p consensus-based systems like Bitcoin are
+not always well understood, and the upgrade mechanisms to the
+consensus rules are a work in progress that may vary depending on the
+type of change being deployed.
+Discussing such changes without a uniform view on the deployment
+paths often leads to misunderstandings and unnecessarily delays the
+deployment of changes. 
+
+==Defintions==
+
+- Software fork: in free software, an existing project can be copied
+  and extended/maintained without permission from the original
+  project's maintainers.
+- Consensus fork: a divergence in the implementation of the
+  verification rules can impede the expected eventual convergence of
+  the network in a single chain that has the most proof of work and
+  also satisfies the rules. This can be intentional or be caused by a
+  bug in consensus validation reimplementations.
+- Softfork: an intentional consensus fork where everything that
+  was previously invalid remains invalid, but some things that were
+  valid also become invalid. Majority of miners can impose
+  this kind of changes and they also have some deployment advantages.
+- Hardfork: an intentional consensus fork that is not a softfork.
+
+==Taxonomy of consensus forks==
+
+===Accidental consensus fork===
+
+Software forks are very different in nature from consensus rules forks. No software
+maintainer has special powers over consensus rules changes. There's
+many good reasons (experimentation, lack of features, independent
+development, diversity, etc) to fork the Bitcoin core software and it's good
+that there's many alternative implementations of the protocol (forks
+of Bitcoin core or written from scratch).
+
+But sometimes a bug in the reimplementaion of the consensus
+validation rules can prevent alternative implementation users from
+following the longest (most work) valid chain. This can result in
+those users losing coins or being defrauded, making reimplementations
+of the consensus validation rules very risky. Note that a natural
+language specification of those rules doesn't help since the
+consensus is not determined by such specification but by the software
+that the majority of the network runs. That's why "the implementation
+is the specification".
+
+But Bitcoin core contains many more things than just consensus
+validation and it would be unreasonable for all alternative
+implementations to depend on it. Bitcoin core should not be the
+specification. That's why the consensus validation is being separated
+into a libbitcoinconsensus library with a C API easily accessible from
+any language. This makes alternative implementations much more secure
+without burdening them with specific design choices made by Bitcoin
+core. It is to be noted that sharing the same code for consensus
+validation doesn't prevent alternative implementations from
+independently changing their consensus rules: they can always fork
+the libbitcoinconsensus project (once it is in a separate repository). 
+
+Hopefully libbitcoinconsensus will remove this type of consensus fork
+which - being accidental - obviously don't need a deployment plan.
+
+====11/12 March 2013 Chain Fork====
+
+There is a precedent of an accidental consensus fork at height 225430. 
+Without entering in much detail, the situation was different from
+what's being described from the alternative implementation risks (today alternative implementation
+still usually rely in different degrees on bitcoin core trusted proxies, which
+is very reasonable considering the lack of a complete
+libbitcoinsensus).
+The two conflicting consensus validation implementations were two
+different versions of Bitcoin core (Bitcoin-qt at the time): 0.8
+against all versions prior to it. Most miners had been fast on
+upgrading to 0.8 and they were also fast on downgrading to 0.7 as an
+emergency when they were ask to by the developers community.
+
+Without entering in much detail[2], the issue was that BDB was being
+abandoned in favor of levelDB, and - at the same time - the miner's
+policy block size limit was being lift (it was not a consensus rule,
+not even enforced via softfork). Even after testing, a case where
+levelDB couldn't correctly validate certain bigger blocks only appeared after
+deployment in production. Fortunately this was handled very well and
+rapidly by the whole worldwide community and nobody is unhappy about
+the solution.
+
+But there's some philosophical disagreements on the terms of what the
+solution was: we can add a pedantic note on that.   
+If "the implementation is the specification", then those
+levelDB-specific limitations were part of the consensus rules.
+Then additional rules were necessary and any alternative
+implementation (including 0.8) would have to implement it. Then a
+planned consensus fork to migrate all Bitcoin-qt 0.7- users could
+remove those additional consensus restrictions.
+Had libconsensus being implemented without depending on levelDB,
+those additional restrictions wouldn't have been "the implementation
+is the specification" and this would just have been a bug in the
+consensus rules, just a consensus-critical bug in a set of
+implementations, concretely all satoshi-bitcoin-0.7-or-less (which
+happened to be a huge super majority of the users), but other
+implementations (like libbitcoin) would be free from such bug and
+implementing the correct libconsensus specification. But since the
+buggy implementation was a super-majority, the solution would have
+been to instantly (from a specific block) change the rules to not let
+the super-majority deviate from the specification and then have
+another consensus fork to remove them. Two theoretical consensus forks
+instead of one but the first one deployed practically for free. The
+practical result would have been identical and only the definitions
+change. This means discussing something that went uncontroversially
+well further is "philosophical bike-shed" (TM).  
+
+===Unilateral softforks===
+
+If it is in their best interest of miners to softfork it should be
+assumed that they may likely enforce it. In some cases, even against the will of a
+super-majority of users. This is practically an attack on the network
+and the only solution is to carefully design the incentives so that
+the case is simply impossible. If that fails, miners should still
+consider the risk of motivating a schism hardfork before attempting
+such a consensus fork. A deployment plan for this case is also
+unnecessary.
+
+===Schism[1] hardforks===
+
+In all of the following examples there's clearly a confrontation that
+is being resolved using an intentional consensus fork.
+
+Being a schism hardfork, there will likely be 2 chains
+coexisting for at least some time, maybe forever. Maybe bitcoin
+becomes bitcoinA and bitcoinB. The implications for market
+capitalization are completely unpredictable, 
+maybe mc(bitcoinA) = mc(bitcoinB) = mc(old_bitcoin), 
+maybe mc(bitcoinA) + mc(bitcoinB) = mc(old_bitcoin), 
+maybe mc(bitcoinA) + mc(bitcoinB) = 1000 * mc(old_bitcoin),
+maybe mc(bitcoinA) + mc(bitcoinB) = 0,
+... 
+
+This is very disruptive and hopefully will never be needed. But if
+it's needed the best deployment path is just to activate the rule
+changes after certain block height in the future. On the other hand,
+it is healthy decentralization-wise that many independent software
+projects are ready to deploy a schism hardfork.
+
+====ASIC-reset hardfork====
+
+Imagine ASIC production has been consolidated to a single company and
+distribution is simply not happening: the company is keeping them to
+mine itself. For that or another reason, a single entity controls
+40%+ of the hashrate and there's no hope for an spontaneous
+improvement in decentralization. Such an untenable centralization could
+be fixed (with great risks) by switching the hash function used in the
+proof of work, effectively "pressing the restart button" on the ASIC
+market. [The next function should be simple to implement in ASIC as
+well so that the market can more easily develop as a healthy and
+competitive one (as opposed to what the "ASIC-hard" proponents would
+want), but that's another story...]
+
+Since in this case the confrontation is clearly against the current
+miners any notion of "miners' voting" is utterly irrelevant.
+
+====Anti-Block-creator hardfork====
+
+There's less extreme cases where changing the pow function would not
+be necessary. For example, let's imagine a bright future where
+commoditized ASICs are running in millions home-heaters all over the
+world, but the block size has been completely removed and the network has devolved to a
+very centralized system where only 2 big pools have the resources to
+fully validate full blocks and create block templates with competitive levels of
+transaction fees. In that case, changing the pow function would be a
+terrible waste and a risk that could be avoided. A hardfork restoring
+a block size limit could help fixing this situation. Please don't
+take it as an argument for or against raising the block size limit:
+it's just an example. But in this case, again, those 2 big pools
+would probably be against the fork and, again, their voting is
+irrelevant.
+
+Like in the previous example, miners are expected to oppose and they
+have to be ignored.
+
+====Anti-cabal hardfork====
+
+Let's imagine BIP66 [TODO remove has been deployed, but it] had a crypto backdoor
+that nobody noticed and allows an evil developer cabal to steal
+everyone's coins. The users and non-evil developers could join, fork
+libconsensus and use the forked version in their respective bitcoin
+implementations. 
+Should miner's "vote" to express their consent? What if some miners
+are part of the cabal? In the unlikely event that most miners are
+part of such an evil cabal, changing the pow function may be
+required. In other cases, mining "vote" doesn't have much value
+either since this kind of hardfork would not qualify as
+uncontroversial anyway.
+
+===Uncontroversial consensus upgrades===
+
+"Uncontroversial" is something though to define in this context. What
+if a single user decides he won't upgrade no matter what and
+he doesn't even attempt to explain his decision? Obviously, such
+a user should be just ignored. But what if the circumstances are
+slightly different? What if they're 2, 10 users? where's the line.
+It is possible that we can never have a better definition than "I know
+it when I see it" [citation needed].
+
+====Uncontroversial softforks====
+
+If a majority of miners adopts a softfork, users will follow that
+chain, even without understanding the new rules. For them is like
+if blocks are created in a certain way or certain valid transactions
+are being rejected by miners for some reason. For old nodes it just
+looks like the new rules are policy rules rather than consensus rules.
+This greatly reduces the deployment risks, making softforks the
+preferred consensus rules upgrade mechanism.
+
+The first precedent of a softfork was the introduction of P2SH
+documented in BIP16. There were competing proposals, but BIP12 had
+clear disadvantage and  BIP17 was considered a less tested but
+functionally equivalent version by most of the reviewers. Although it
+was later discovered that BIP16 had unnecessary limitations and BIP17
+is now considered superior, this probably still qualified for our
+vague concept of "uncontroversial".
+
+At the time, there was no "mining voting" implementation and it was
+simply deployed using the timestamp of the blocks at some time in the
+future as the activation trigger. This can't guarantee the assumption
+that most miners have upgraded before enforcing the new rules and
+that's why the voting mechanism and first used for BIP30 and BIP66.
+The current voting threshold for softfork enforcement is 95%. There's
+also a 75% threshold for miners to activate it as a policy rule, but
+it should be safe for miners to activate such a policy from the start
+or later than 75%, as long as they enforce it as consensus rule after 95%. 
+
+The current miners' voting mechanism can be modified to allow for
+changes to be deployed in parallel, the rejection of a concrete
+softfork without getting locked for the deployment of the next one,
+and also a more efficient use of the version field in block
+headers [3]. BIP65 is expected to be deployed with the improved
+mechanism.
+
+====Uncontroversial hardforks====
+
+Some consensus changes require all participants to upgrade their software
+before the new rules can be safely activated or they will face serious
+risk of following the wrong chain and being defrauded. Even if the
+exact same mechanism used for softforks would be more risky in these
+cases, that doesn't mean that this type of changes cannot be deployed
+in an uncontroversial and safe manner.
+
+The simplest approach is to select a block height far enough in the
+future that everybody has plenty of time to change their software.
+But if you're aiming for universal adoption, that includes miners'
+adoption, so it seems reasonable to use a mining voting on top of
+that. In this case there's only one relevant threshold and it could
+be different from the softfork one. Probably 100% is too strict,
+since it would allow a relatively small miner to attack the network
+and block a consensus upgrade. Something between 99% and 95% is
+probably a sensible choice for this parameter.
+
+====Uncontroversial emergency hardforks====
+
+Emergency forks may not have time to consult miners and have to be
+deployed simply by choosing a block height not so far in the future.
+
+But emergency forks could be prepared ahead of time. For example, an
+intermediary version of software could allow blocks
+that are double the size of old blocks (after a certain height in the
+future) while still making miners reject bigger blocks as a softfork
+rule. Then miners can start the regular process for uncontroversial
+softfork (or a unilateral softfork if they're a majority) at any
+point in the future if it is required, and both intermediary and new
+versions would be prepared for it (which would make deployment much
+easier). Other related consensus changes could be deployed in the
+meantime (say, quadrupling the block size) making the emergency
+softfork unnecessary.
+
+==Code==
+
+This BIP is complemented with a concrete code proposal[4] for an
+uncontroversial hardfork which acts as a precedent and removes the
+perception that hardforks are impossible in Bitcoin. The deployment of
+the proposal should not block any other potential hardforks (thus it
+will required the version bits proposal[3] to be implemented). The
+change itself doesn't add much complexity to Bitcoin Core and is simple
+enough that is trivial to apply to diverse implementations (that
+currently can only use libbitcoinconsensus to validate script-related
+rules). The change has been already widely tested in many altcoins.
+
+The chosen consensus change is the fix of the timewarp attack
+discovered and also fixed with a simple patch[5] by @ArtForz. This
+change has been deployed by most altcoins that made any minimally
+meaningful change to bitcoin and thus can be considered somewhat
+tested (in fact, most SHA256d altcoins that didn't implemented it have
+died or being forced to implement it as an emergency hardfork). When
+deploying this change has been discussed, usually arguments in the
+lines of "if we get to the point when this matters to bitcoin, we
+would be already in serious trouble" were used against it. This
+shouldn't be seen as a disadvantage in this context, since it means we
+can safely activate the fix very far away in the future (say, 4 years
+worth of blocks).
+
+==Attribution==
+
+Incorporated suggestions from @btcdrak.
+
+==Footnotes==
+
+[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schism
+
+[2] https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0050.mediawiki
+
+[3] http://sourceforge.net/p/bitcoin/mailman/message/34146741/ 
+
+[4] https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/compare/0.11...jtimon:hardfork-timewarp-0.11
+
+[5] Original references:
+https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=114751.0
+https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=43692.msg521772#msg521772
+Rebased patch: 
+https://github.com/freicoin/freicoin/commit/beb2fa54745180d755949470466cbffd1cd6ff14
+
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