BUIP0**: Protocol Integration

[Bryce Weiner]

Summary

Block 458,063 as mined by BTC.com and accepted by the network signaled for both Bitcoin Unlimited and Segregated Witness. As these two technological developments are not mutually exclusive, it behooves the Bitcoin community to explore this option and for Bitcoin Unlimited to provide a leadership role. This BUIP proposes a development path to resolve Bitcoin community questions as to the event of a hard fork by setting the overall objective of bringing Bitcoin Unlimited in line with the protocol as developed by Bitcoin Core.

Objectives
1. Integrate all outstanding BIPs as implemented in the Bitcoin Core protocol as of version 0.14.0.
2. End fear, uncertainty, and doubt in regard to a potential hard fork of the Bitcoin network.
3. Demonstrate that Bitcoin development is truly an open source, decentralized, collaborative effort.

Potential Issues
This BUIP would suggest inclusion of "replace by fee," so deprecation of BUIP004 will be required. With the technological improvements offered by bringing Bitcoin Unlimited development in line with approved and active BIPs as of the Core client version 0.14.0, "replace by fee" becomes irrelevant so a path for deprecation of that feature becomes possible.

This BUIP would replace efforts on BUIP037 and BUIP045.

Backward Compatibility
A thorough examination must be conducted to verify complete backward compatibility with the existing Bitcoin Unlimited protocol implementation.

Deployment
This deployment requires a series of soft forks which must be analyzed and addressed.

Fall Back

As deployment is a series of soft forks to activate each requisite update, the fall back path may be equally incremental and particular to each soft fork.

 

[freetrader]

On a first observation, it seems it would be less effort to take the Core 0.14 codebase and implement Emergent Consensus on it, while setting SegWit to activate concurrently with a hardfork.
Which might be what the BitcoinEC project is planning to do. Have you considered this option, and proposed it to either Bitcoin Core or to BitcoinEC?

 

[Bryce Weiner]

I would agree, and my intent for contributing this BUIP as written was an, perhaps naive, attempt at reconciling outstanding issues and avoiding a hard fork of the network into two.

As of this morning, Jihan Wu's statements exclude such a compromise as possible. That being the case, this proposal no longer has value.

Thank you for your consideration.