This is a guest post by Jason HughesVP for development and technology on Sea mining. Opinions expressed are entirely his own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc. or Bitcoin Magazine. The article originally appeared on X.com and has been published with the permission of the author.
Let me start by saying that I am not pro BIP110 and I am not anti-BIP110. If it actually succeeds as something that achieves true consensus in the network and ends up being enforced by a majority of the network… cool. If so, then we’ll go with it because the network has spoken and accepted it, and all nodes, including non-BIP110 nodes, will be brought along for the ride. Unfortunately for proponents of the proposal, that simply isn’t the case at the moment by any measurable metric, nor does it appear to have a trajectory to suggest it will change.
There has been a lot of misleading information about it all, especially in relation to mining. A few quick key points to briefly address some hyperbole from proponents: BIP110 is NOT inevitable. It CAN fail. BIP110 can and will cause a chain split/fork in a minority hashrate situation. BIP110 is NOT without risk for miners who choose to adopt it. Miners who don’t support BIP110 don’t suddenly mine “invalid” blocks just because a yet-to-be-adopted proposal simply exists. You are not a bad person or evil just because you don’t like or support BIP110. (The fact that I feel the need to point out that last part is actually kind of sad…)
I was going to write a long post to help keep miners informed of things to stay aware of as this all unfolds… until I realized I already did that months ago as a document I authored that I had hoped could be published as a miner training course on OCEAN. Unfortunately, it was never published. So I went ahead and updated it and here it is.
Again, keep in mind this was written months ago, intended to be as agnostic as possible in an effort to make it passable as a business post. That effort failed, so I’m posting it as a personal document today instead. As a miner making important decisions about your operations, you need to be aware of all this without the sugar coating and frankly downright misleading information coming from some of the BIP110 supporters. You have to be vigilant and decide what is right for you.
While there is certainly some misinformation from the opposition as well, nothing I have seen is nearly as egregious as the extremely premature claims of victory and attendant hyperbole pushed by the BIP110 site. Summarizing my doc a bit, my personal suggestion to miners is this: Signal if you support BIP110. Don’t say if you don’t support BIP110 or don’t care. Either way, monitor the network on/around/before block 961632.
If you continue to see non-signaling blocks from large pools, you can be reasonably sure that they won’t suddenly decide later to throw away millions of dollars in revenue to go back and signal to BIP110. If by chance they start signaling for BIP110, you should monitor it and consider switching as needed to stay on the heaviest chain. The key point is that realistically only one side can win. It’s either BIP110 succeeds and miners not on the BIP110 side fail, or BIP110 fails and miners on the non-BIP110 side succeed.
Go ahead, let’s dive into a small fraction of my reasoning.
FAST FACTS: Between 7 and 15% of Bitcoin Nodes Signal Support for BIP110.
Depending on which centralized crawler you’re looking at… no way to know for sure [how many BIP110 nodes are signaling support]. My personal private crawler puts this number much lower, but that’s a discussion for another day. Suffice it to say, I think it is logical and correct to say that even 15% is not a majority.
“But Jason! UASF got Segwit enabled with fewer nodes!”
Yep, because many miners, merchants, users, etc. all actually wanted Segwit. There was a huge economic and social weight behind it. Without repeating it all, as plenty of resources on the subject from before BIP110 are worth reading, suffice it to say that BIP110 and Segwit activations are not entirely comparable, as many have already pointed out. Segwit, for example, entered its UASF territory with about 1/3 of the network’s hashrate already signaling support. With that kind of backing, UASF made a lot of sense to help push MASF over the tipping point. It doesn’t make sense here for BIP110.
FAST FACTS: 0.6% of blocks over the past 60 days have signaled support for BIP110.
[0.6% is a] pretty stark contrast to even Segwit’s low baseline support. Yes, I know it’s gone up a bit in the last few weeks, but no new entrants. Just more clearly rented hashrate from one of the same small advocates.
Something to keep in mind is that mining BIP110 signal blocks via DATUM on OCEAN involves virtually no risk to the miner until the fork point at block 961632. The costs are negligible as you are effectively guaranteed to cover rental costs etc.
It’s great that the ability to do that exists and I wouldn’t have it any other way… but just something to keep in mind when weighing signals from such blocks in the big picture from a risk-reward, money-on-the-table perspective.
“But Jason! Miners have no incentive to signal until the last minute!”
Nor do I see any indication that this could be the case. Subjectively, I disagree with the premise, as it is not in a mining pool’s best interest to destabilize the network in such a way. Part of the reason for early signaling and lock-in periods is to help coordinate upgrades in an agile manner. Waiting until the last minute negates that advantage completely. I see no compelling reason or upside to doing so.
Continuing on this, as part of my personal node monitoring setup, I specifically monitor nodes that are known to belong to various entities, such as other mining pools, exchanges, large lightning hubs, merchants, etc. A supermajority of which are monitored with explicit permission and confirmation/coordination.
FAST FACTS: All major mining pools I monitor are currently running some variant of Bitcoin Core v30 or v31 (except OCEAN).
Extend it, most [mining pools] have updated their nodes since the release of BIP110, even since the release of Knots 29.3. Additionally, many mining pools are known to run modified versions of their node software to facilitate different requirements for their specific infrastructure. Such changes must be transferred to a BIP110 compliant client, tested, evaluated and implemented in advance. I currently see no evidence that this is currently the case.
As far as I can tell the pools are paying attention but ignoring.
“But Jason! Miners don’t decide consensus! Nodes do! Otherwise they’ll just cancel halvings!”
This is one of the funniest and most ridiculous arguments I’ve heard from the pro-BIP110 crowd. Comparing a consensus change that can be unilaterally enforced on the network by miners and accepted by 100% of existing nodes (a soft fork) to a hard fork that no existing node will accept… is disingenuous at best. T
tighter rules (like BIP110): Soft fork, enforceable by miners if they choose to do so. Resolving rules (like canceling a halving): Hard fork, cannot be enforced by miners without effectively 100% buy-in from the entire network… which is unlikely to happen. Comparing the two is, frankly, just silly.
“But Jason! If you don’t upgrade to the latest consensus rules, you’re unsafe! You’ll lose money! You’ll mine invalid blocks! You’ll [insert additional hyperbole here]!”
This would be true for a consensus change that has, well, consensus. While BIP110 has made a valiant effort to achieve this consensus, it has yet to have any measurable majority at what is now arguably the 11th hour. Not in nodes, not in hashrate, not in the social layers (consensus.health has a cool visual where you find me in the middle).
If BIP110 somehow gains 51%+ of network hashrate at/before block 961632… then okay. It is enforced as a soft fork by a majority of miners can unilaterally enforce it in the absence of a fully adopted URSF (actually a misnomer as this would be a hard fork).
“But Jason! It can’t achieve consensus by already having consensus! You’ve got to give it a chance!”
Firstly… no I don’t, although I have. Second, it is a rushed proposal that has never had time to try to achieve real consensus. It has been 7 months since the release of the first BIP110 client. There are ~3 weeks left before “mandatory” signaling starts from now (less by the time you read this). 90% of the time available has passed without any change in the overall mood of relevant players. If it hasn’t gained enough adoption in the last 7 months, it probably won’t in the next 3 weeks.
“But Jason! CSAM! CSAM! Pedophiles! CSAM!”
I’ll be the first to say even I personally overestimated the risk here early on when Core proposed his OP_RETURN change. I personally expected something particularly violent to hit the chain almost immediately, and as far as I know, that hasn’t happened yet. Could it still happen? Yes, I suppose.
But considering from a technical perspective, byte-for-byte the same contiguous arbitrary data can provably end up being stored in the current chain or the BIP-110 chain without much of a problem… this particular argument for BIP-110 falls pretty flat to me at this point.
Do I want CSAM in the chain? Of course not. Am I a pedophile if I don’t support BIP110? Neither.
Final thoughts
I could go on and on and on, but I’ll stop here. I’ve wasted enough time on this. I’m sure I’ve done a lot to annoy both sides of the BIP110 debate at this point, as I don’t take either position. I’m sure I’ll catch flak from all angles just for daring to speak my mind about it.
Overall, I mostly think it was stupid to approach solving a real problem (the OP_RETURN default change in Bitcoin Core) with the maximum anti-spam manifest based soft fork proposal… which demonstrably cannot stop spam, arbitrary data, etc. 🤦♂️ (Yes, I know, supporters will argue that it’s not about spam either… and what arguments make it not about spam either… seems to be correct.)
I’ll close with the admission that I could be wrong. I am not Nostradamus and I cannot accurately predict the outcome with 100% certainty. I can only go by what the data tells me, so I give BIP110’s success less than a 5% chance of actually succeeding… and I consider that generous. You can take my opinions on this however you want, but I highly recommend that you don’t discount the actual data points, stay vigilant and do what’s best for you and your mining income. Don’t get turned on by either side of the debate and make your own decisions.
Here is a link to the same document linked above for ease of access.