Post
Topic
Board Beginners & Help
Re: [Guide] Handling splits: UASFs, BIP148, etc.
by
theymos
on 17/07/2017, 22:47:50 UTC
Can you please elaborate? It feels so weird to see in Bitcoin Core:
Warning: Unknown block versions being mined! It's possible unknown rules are in effect

One way to deploy softforks is specified in BIP9. This is how SegWit was supposed to be activated, but it requires miner cooperation. Miners are now doing a different weird thing called BIP91 which abuses the BIP9 mechanism in order to signal amongst themselves support for later hard-enforcing SegWit-BIP9 signalling.

So your Bitcoin Core thinks that sometime after it was released, a new softfork was released and is now about to be activated. You then might want to upgrade in order to continue verifying 100% of the consensus rules. But that's not actually what's happening: what's actually happening is that miners are rudely talking to each other over this sensitive channel without concern for the side-effects you're seeing. There is no softfork-enabled software that you could upgrade to.

Is this signaling part of the forking process?

There are several possible forks/splits on or around Aug 1. (Most of which will not actually happen/succeed.) This is a side-effect of one of them.