UASF Is Winning The Chicken Game, But Not The Way Its Supporters Expected

Such a fascinating stream of events, stay with me for the Bitcoin drama…

In one of my previous article I came up with the chicken game analogy. I applied this to the UASF situation. Here’s a quick recap, in case you missed it:

UASF is a chicken game, a Hawk-Dove game. You know when two car is rushing straight towards each other and the winner is the one that doesn’t turn the wheel. There are a few paradox situations when illogical behaviour is the most logical behaviour. For example if you get into this situation you want to drink a bottle a vodka in front of your opponent, sit in the car and throw out the wheel.

And here’s the inevaitable video illustration:

NYA/USAF/Core “compatibility”

I will go a bit technical in this section, what obviously means most of you turn off your brains and just scan it through, but I would strongly advise otherwise. Make some mental effort and understand it once and for all. And you’ll finally be able to win Reddit arguments, what is very important.

Bitcoin Core nodes say

“BIP141 (SegWit) will be locked in for activation if 95% of the miners signal for it at bit 1.”

UASF (BIP148) nodes say

“If BIP141 is not locked in by August 1 we will refuse every block those are not signalling for BIP141.”

This also means: UASF nodes refuse all blocks those are not building on top of a BIP141 signalling blocks. Consider the following:

Block 100 — signal BIP14 1 -UASF accepts it.

-UASF accepts it. Block 101 — does not signal BIP14 1 — UASF refuses it.

— UASF refuses it. Block 102 — does signal BIP141, but it builds on top of Block 101, which doesn’t so UASF refuses it.

UASF would only accept blocks on top of Block 100. Now that’s a chain split.

If the UASF chain at any time happens to be longer at any point of time than the legacy chain Core nodes abandon the legacy chain and continue with the UASF chain.

Signalception — New Yor Agreement (NYA)

Samson Mow’s tweet perfectly describes what’s happening. Let’s dismiss the first part, because we already passed that: already over 80% of miners pinky sweared into the blockchain that they will push through the the NYA.

Let’s examine the second part:

signal using bit4 to signal bit1 to signal BIP141 activation.

More specifically they promise: ”once 80% of blocks that they mine are signalling using bit 4 they will orphan any blocks that don’t signal under bit 1.” Notice here: this is essentially the same as the BIP148 UASF, it just isn’t set to a time condition, which is August 1 for UASF, but to the condition: “if over 80% is signalling at bit 4”.

The New Meaning of the UASF Movement

Ok, I say it: UASF (BIP148) is dead, but it’s still winning in a strange way. It’s dead, because the New York agreement took away too much support from UASF. UASF needs economic nodes and miners. NYA takes away a big chunk of the former and all of the latter.

But it’s still winning, because SegWit will be activated and hard fork will not happen. Why not, you ask?

Core will not merge the HF code.

Darknet Markets would be crippled by suddenly multiplying their resource requirements by 500%.

So what the UASF guys should be doing right now? Exactly what they are doing right now. Make everyone believe they will not stop running their UASF nodes. With this they are constantly pressuring the NYA miners to not break the agreement before it’s time, which is: before the hard fork happens, and after SegWit activates.

So what should UASF guys should be doing in the future? Keep their chicken game up until the very end and stop running their UASF nodes right before August 1 if SegWit has not activated by then.

In this case they should start heavily build up the momentum for BIP149 UASF (don’t ask), which has nearly unanimous support by Core developers, which is terrifying for the misbehaving miners. This way the UASF movement will be able to exercise even more pressure.

Isn’t it the most fascinating chicken game you’ve ever witnessed?