On February 15, 2020, BitcoinABC, the main development group of BCH, posted an announcement on its official website www.bitcoinabc.org about accepting community donations (IFP). BitcoinABC stated in the announcement that BIP9 will be launched for hashrate voting. If it agrees that the hashrate reaches the activation value, the miner infrastructure donation plan (IFP) will be launched in the next version 0.21.0, and 12.5% of the donated block reward will be reduced to 5 %, And the donated projects need to be added to the white list before they can accept community donations. Currently, the proposed donated projects are Bitcoin ABC, Electron Cash and BCHD.
BIP9
BIP9 is a protocol used for soft fork in bitcoin. In the specified block, when the block that selects the new protocol (that is, the implementation of IFP) reaches 95%, it means that the IFP hashrate has passed and it also represents everyone's support This program. If it does not reach 95%, it means that the new agreement scheme has not passed and the miners refuse to implement the IFP.
BIP9 is essentially a flexible computing power voting mechanism. It is still a voting system. Only after the vote is passed can the client be launched. It is not that the outside world said that ABC directly launched the IFP protocol. BIP9 can be used for different versions at the same time, as long as the non-conflicting Version bit is used, which means that no matter what the result of the vote, BCH will still remain complete and independent, and a small amount of hash power against it will not fork a new coin Species. The original BTC used BIP9 when implementing CSV (BIP68, BIP112, and BIP113) and SegWit (BIP141, BIP143, and BIP147), and all passed hashrate votes.
Block donation output 5%
In the announcement, one of the larger changes is that the donation output was reduced from 12.5% proposed by Jiang Zhuoer to 5%. It seems that the amount of donations to the community has been reduced, but in the ABC announcement, the 6-month experimental period advocated by Jiang Zhuoer was not found. It seems that the 5% block donation was changed to a permanent rule. Further explanation of BitcoinABC is still pending. In any case, if 5% is too much or too little, more scientific testing and discussion are needed, and it should not be set so casually.
Jiang Zhuoer planned to deploy IFP in the major upgrade in May or November of this year after the vote was passed, but BitcoinABC's new plan was immediately deployed to the next version after the vote, with the efficiency of past ABC updates. Look, there may be several updates in a month, BitcoinABC seems to be a little anxious.
Donation Whitelist
Whitelist is probably the most contentious point in the BitcoinABC announcement. BitcoinABC believes that the funds can be donated to more than one project, or directly to whitelisted projects (currently Bitcoin ABC, Electron Cash and BCHD). Whitelisted projects must meet 4 criteria:
1. Must be infrastructure.
2. Must be "for everyone".
3. It must be open source and compatible with other projects.
4. Priority should be given to projects that are short of money.
Funding is an indispensable resource for the development process of any project team, and also determines the ultimate success of the project. The BCH Copernicus project was broken because of the funding chain, which eventually led to the project abortion. Since any project needs funding, to whom should this money be given? Bitcoin ABC seems to believe that the core of donation is to help the poor but not the best. Projects that lack money should be donated first, rather than high-quality projects.
Bitcoin ABC currently has three whitelisted items, Bitcoin ABC, Electron Cash, and BCHD. Needless to say, ABC's main development team, Electron Cash is a wallet that supports BCH mixed currency services, and has a certain number of users. BCHD is a weaker team among BCH's many development teams. It seems that in addition to lack of money, Electron Cash and BCHD have been reluctant to be included in the whitelist. The Bitcoin Unlimited (BU) development team with a more user base is obviously more qualified than the two above. BU is not only The client version with the most users outside ABC, Bitcoin ABC seems to be excluding BU.
All in all, the whitelist plan seems to have aroused everyone's resentment, and the opposition to the Bitcoin ABC announcement is endless in domestic and foreign communities.
Roger ver publicly opposes
Roger ver's arguing with Bitcoin ABC's chief developer Amaury over the past period of time, which has received widespread attention from the community, and Roger ver himself rarely spoke to the ABC or miner donation plans in the past. On February 16th, Roger ver specially released a video declaring his objection to Bitcoin ABC. Roger ver believes that ABC has the freedom to write code, but miners and users also have the freedom not to use their software version. Roger ver believes that this time The new plan has too many problems and the community will not agree.
In fact, with the high computing power requirement of 95% of BIP9, there are so many new announcements and controversies will continue to arise.
I am currently promoting an idea to gather 100% BCH miner acceptance. if we use 100% pro-BCH miners who agree in advance to mine and donate, then, I believe it is their money to send wherever they choose. This may overcome some of the technical concerns. I do not care how it is done, but, maybe pools created or designated as pro-funding could be created and miners could join or remain in those pools that intend to mine BCH and donate. Miners who do not like where the donations are going could leave the pool at will. I think for this to work we would need enough miners to fully mine BCH.