@jimmysong recently made a careful argument about BIP110: Bitcoin is a dynamic system, and you can't know a soft fork's consequences in advance. "I don't know the consequences," he wrote, "and neither do you." He's right about the uncertainty and the limits of prediction. But there's a third option worth considering. The choice isn't only between *knowing* an outcome (hubris) and *not knowing* it (watch and learn). For one specific question, will a contested fork succeed, fail, or split the chain? deep uncertainty doesn't mean zero information. You can't predict a dynamic system's full trajectory. But you can bound it. You can map which conditions push a contested fork toward a clean win, which push it toward a sustained split, and where the boundary between them sits. That's what simulation is for. We ran 2,694 contested-fork scenarios on real bitcoind nodes using Warnet with mining pools, exchanges, and users modeled as the actors BCAP (https://github.com/bitcoin-cap/bcap) defines, each making independent economic decisions to map exactly that boundary. We don't claim to know whether BIP110 should activate. We claim something narrower: the success-or-failure of a contested fork isn't pure fog. It has structure, and that structure is measurable in advance. Full methodology and findings at the University of Wyoming Bitcoin Research Institute workshop @Bradley Rettler , July 13–17. Thread to follow.

GitHub

GitHub - pfoytik/Bitcoin-Fork-Governance-Study: Research studying measurable way to quantify threshold values of participating entities during contentious soft forks

Research studying measurable way to quantify threshold values of participating entities during contentious soft forks - pfoytik/Bitcoin-Fork-Govern...

Epistemic humility and quantitative analysis aren't opposites. You can hold both. View quoted note →