I'm noticing a trend the past few years and in particular more recently to glamorize what happened with UASF (been guilty of some of that myself). If you don't know what UASF was, it stands for "user activated soft fork" and was essentially a pressure movement to compel miners to activate Segwit as they were blocking it on political grounds. Like many others, I initially supported UASF because it had noble intentions and at first glance seemed like the right way to deal with malicious miners, though I quickly realised that encouraging users to run consensus rules that could split them off from mainstream Bitcoin was probably a bit dangerous, even if it did have worthwhile goals. This post by /u/nullc was an important event at the time and did a lot to make people think on the issue.
In hindsight, it's clear UASF is not something to celebrate or have as precedent. All UASF did was train a bunch of users to run software (or endorse) that alters the consensus rules in a dangerous way. On almost all levels UASF did not have any support and would have failed had Jihan been a bit more stubborn:
- UASF did not have a majority of full nodes enforcing it, most simply signalled as uacomment and didn't actually enforce the new consensus rules themselves
- UASF had very little support amongst developers and couldn't even get merged into Core as an optional feature that users could turn on themselves
- UASF had almost non-existent support from the economy and major Bitcoin businesses
- UASF didn't have the support of the miners to secure whatever chain it created
Essentially UASF was just a huge bluff with nothing but loud voices on social media behind it, one of its prominent supporters even said as much. The fact that it even "succeeded" is due more to the incompetence of the miners at understanding the situation and the right moves to make, rather than some massive consensus behind UASF. In fact if Jihan and his friends had held off and let UASF go on; without question most of its hardcore supporters would abandon the new UASF chain and find some way to come back to Bitcoin. Unlike the UAHF that spawned Bitcoin Cash, the UASF crowd weren't interested in becoming altcoiners.
It was a perilous time in history but UASF winning without Core "deciding" on behalf of users set a strong precedent for what BTC needs to endure for the next 300+ years. Users needed to learn it is their responsibility to defend integrity of the system, and that time they did.
-- Warren Togami (Blockstream) https://twitter.com/wtogami/status/1122504023360229376
Quotes like the one above scare the shit out of me, and I've heard too many prominent people in this community say similar things. Bitcoin should only be changed with overwhelming consensus and anything else is an attack and threat to our money. I don't think the UASF crowd changed Bitcoin in any way (rather expedited at great risk the activation of Segwit), but the same tactics of social media political campaigning (right down to the hats!) can be used to put dangerous stuff into Bitcoin. The soft/hard fork dichotomy can be thought of as "adding laws" for soft forks and "removing/relaxing laws" for hard forks, soft forks might sound less risky and better, but you can do a great deal of damage with them.
Future UASF's that follow the same approach as the last one will cause harm whether they succeed or fail. For example one recent example is the idea to reduce block size down to 300kb through a soft fork and as yet another UASF. Such an idea sounds principled, especially to make Bitcoin "more decentralized", but were it to actually succeed and follow the same tactics as the previous UASF (minority of users, no economic support, no miners, social media campaigning, etc), you have set the precedent that Bitcoin can be changed by a radical minority who the majority will grudgingly follow along for fear of splits and drama. If the UASF fails, it will spawn a new chain which will no doubt take away 5-10% of the community and value along with it and potentially have "Bitcoin" in its name somewhere.
In conclusion we need to re-think our attitude to the UASF and future UASF's. They aren't some force of good that helps Bitcoin, they are dangerous, divisive, and risk splitting us apart over minor differences. Soft forks should only get activated when the entire ecosystem is ready and not through force and social media. If you supported UASF no doubt you feel like you were "part" of something and fought the good fight against tyranny, and there might be some truth to that, but ask yourself, were you really prepared to follow through with where the UASF would have led you had it failed? For goodness sake most of you didn't even actually run the UASF binaries, you just signalled with uacomment. It's time we all accept that UASF was a bluff, a damn good one, but definitely not a precedent we should follow. The perceived success of the last UASF is blinding us to the risks, and everyone's too caught up in celebrating and honouring the victory they forget the battle was won using dangerous tactics that ought not be repeated!
No comments:
Post a Comment