Update on the Great Consensus Cleanup Revival

Antoine Poinsot expressed gratitude towards Darosior for revitalizing the Great Consensus Cleanup, highlighting its potential outcomes and technical nuances. He noted that under a future BIP-9-based deployment scenario, it's feasible to have multiple soft-forks activated simultaneously, up to 30, due to each soft-fork being assigned a distinct block nVersion bit. Although BIP-9 suggests a 95% activation threshold for the mainnet, modifying the nThreshold variable can adjust this value. Poinsot pointed out considerations regarding the difficulty adjustment second's grace period and the fix for timewarp vulnerabilities. Given the additional constraint these fixes impose on the validity of mined blocks within the current reward schedule, there might be hesitation in adopting new consensus rules. This hesitancy warrants possibly setting a specific threshold for these changes, separate from others.

Poinsot further contrasted the proposed soft-fork fixes with previous rule sets activated under DEPLOYMENT_TAPROOT, like BIP340, BIP341, and BIP342, which are interconnected in a modular fashion. The four suggested fixes (timewarp, worst-block-time, merkle-tree weakness, and enhanced-duplicated-txn) differ as they don't require mutual adoption. There's a mixed community consensus on these proposals, particularly due to the controversial nature of the minimal "confiscation surface" introduced in the initial GCC proposal in 2019, which didn't appeal broadly or to those with specific use cases potentially impacted.

Therefore, Poinsot recommends distributing each fix across separate BIPs and code change patches. This approach allows for parallel discussions on each fix and possibly enables individual activation of each consensus fix, considering different levels of consensus among them. He mentions an example of outdated code in the Bitcoin Core script interpreter related to an unactivated BIP, indicating the practical implications of non-adoption. This strategy aims to accommodate varying community opinions and ensure a more tailored and effective implementation of consensus changes.