From 04fce4aa75f6c69b57850070c2e837cd7671f233 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Luke Dashjr <luke-jr+git@utopios.org>
Date: Thu, 4 Feb 2016 04:10:30 +0000
Subject: bip-biprevised: Clarify soft-fork blocking by ec. consensus

---
 bip-biprevised.mediawiki | 6 +++++-
 1 file changed, 5 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)

(limited to 'bip-biprevised.mediawiki')

diff --git a/bip-biprevised.mediawiki b/bip-biprevised.mediawiki
index a7de3a1..b496149 100644
--- a/bip-biprevised.mediawiki
+++ b/bip-biprevised.mediawiki
@@ -37,7 +37,7 @@ A process BIP may change status from Draft to Active when it achieves rough cons
 
 See [[bip-0123.mediawiki|BIP 123]] for definitions of the various BIP layers. Activation of this BIP implies activation of BIP 123.
 
-A soft-fork BIP strictly requires a clear miner majority expressed by blockchain voting (eg, using BIP 9), as well as not meeting the inverse criteria for a hard-fork BIP (that is, economic agreement to block the soft-fork with a hard-fork, may be cause to reject that soft-fork BIP despite miner adoption). Because of the possibility of changes to miner dynamics, especially in light of delegated voting (mining pools), it is highly recommended that a supermajority vote around 95% be required by the BIP itself, unless rationale is given for a lower threshold.
+A soft-fork BIP strictly requires a clear miner majority expressed by blockchain voting (eg, using BIP 9). In addition, if the economy seems willing to make a "no confidence" hard-fork (such as a change in proof-of-work algorithm), the soft-fork does not become Final for as long as such a hard-fork has potentially-majority support, or at most three months. Soft-fork BIPs may also set additional requirements for their adoption. Because of the possibility of changes to miner dynamics, especially in light of delegated voting (mining pools), it is highly recommended that a supermajority vote around 95% be required by the BIP itself, unless rationale is given for a lower threshold.
 
 A hard-fork BIP requires adoption from the entire Bitcoin economy, particularly including those selling desirable goods and services in exchange for bitcoin payments, as well as Bitcoin holders who wish to spend or would spend their bitcoins (including selling for other currencies) differently in the event of such a hard-fork. Adoption must be expressed by de facto usage of the hard-fork in practice (ie, not merely expressing public support, although that is a good step to establish agreement before adoption of the BIP). This economic adoption cannot be established merely by a super-majority, except by literally forcing the minority to accept the hard-fork (whether this is viable or not is outside the scope of this document).
 
@@ -70,6 +70,10 @@ How can economic agreement veto a soft-fork?
 
 * The group of miners is determined by the consensus rules for the dynamic-membership multi-party signature (for Bitcoin, the proof-of-work algorithm), which can be modified with a hard-fork. Thus, if the same conditions required to modify this group are met in opposition to a soft-fork, the miner majority supporting the soft-fork is effectively void because the economy can decide to replace them with another group of would-be miners who do not support the soft-fork.
 
+What happens if the economy decides to hard-fork away from a controversial soft-fork, more than three months later?
+
+* The controversial soft-fork, in this circumstance, changes from Final to Replaced status to reflect the nature of the hard-fork replacing the previous (final) soft-fork.
+
 What is the ideal percentage of listening nodes needed to adopt peer services proposals?
 
 * This is unknown, and set rather arbitrarily at this time. For a random selection of peers to have at least one other peer implementing the extension, 13% or more would be necessary, but nodes could continue to scan the network for such peers with perhaps some reasonable success. Furthermore, service bits exist to help identification upfront.
-- 
cgit v1.2.3

