Using the Acceptable Depth mechanism to vote for different versions bits

[solex]

@Erik Hedman
It is nice to read your idea about using the AD to give node owners more control over the implementation of soft-forks / version bit changes. Technically this should work, the main difficulty is social. Most node owners are happy to use default settings and defer to what is implicit developer advice. Even in BU with block-size aware users, you can see that most nodes maintain the default AD & EB settings. You can see them in the subversion text visible on bitnodes. (It is easy to determine the default values.)
So, I suspect that further refinement of the AD might not have enough variation in settings to cause a change in consensus unless the version bit was very controversial.

 

[Erik Hedman]

@HelloGuy

As a non-mining node, how my choice will give miners any incentives?

It could not be propagation time. Miners usually are setting up their own network to broadcast their block in a very fast way.

I have been thinking about that question too, and yes, if mining pools are few and does not care about the adoption of their blocks among other nodes, the only result of my setting to not accept a certain version bit until some other blocks have been built above it, will be that i will constantly lag the rest of the network.

Maybe this would only be effective if a majority of nodes use the acceptable depth for version bits and if the mining was less centralized. That is one of the things i like discussing, would it matter now? Later? At all?
[doublepost=1472635475][/doublepost]
@solex

…the main difficulty is social.
…
So, I suspect that further refinement of the AD might not have enough variation in settings to cause a change in consensus unless the version bit was very controversial.

I agree, and I'm fine with that. That's how politics and democracy works. Very few would care if a certain tax would be 21% or 22%. But, they would probably care if the choice would be to have it or not.