F2Pool Co-founder Chun Wang: BIP-54 Must First Gain Absolute Majority Signals
F2Pool co-founder Chun Wang stated that he personally does not support BIP-54, but if the proposal is advanced strictly according to the BIP-9 activation mechanism and reaches the required absolute majority miner signal threshold, F2Pool will update its mining pool nodes; until then, the team will not send support signals for BIP-54.
BIP-54, known as the "Consensus Cleanup" soft fork proposal, aims to fix several consensus edge issues left over from early versions of Bitcoin, including timestamp manipulation, resource consumption in the worst-case scenario for block validation, and risks of double spending. The proposal bundles multiple rule changes into one soft fork, which supporters view as a long-term technical debt cleanup, while opponents argue that different issues should be discussed separately to avoid binding multiple consensus adjustments to a single activation process.
BIP-9 is an activation mechanism that allows miners to express their readiness for upgrades through block version bits. Traditional BIP-9 deployments typically require 95% of blocks to signal within one difficulty adjustment period; if the threshold is not met within the specified time, the proposal will time out and fail. BIP-54 has not yet begun formal activation signaling. Chun Wang's statement indicates that F2Pool will not actively promote this upgrade but will comply with the network consensus results once an absolute majority is formed through formal procedures.
Miners, node operators, wallets, exchanges, and custodians are the direct cost bearers of such upgrades. If a mining pool signals support in advance, it may gain a voice in directing the protocol, but it also bears the risk of ecosystem fragmentation; nodes, exchanges, and custodians need to verify software compatibility, deploy new versions, and prepare for abnormal chain handling. Before BIP-54 forms a clear miner signal, funds will not directly flow to any new asset, but Bitcoin infrastructure service providers, mining pools, and development teams will face testing, coordination, and governance costs, while market sensitivity to chain split risks will increase.
Source: Public Information
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Chun Wang's position continues the classic strategy of Bitcoin miners in protocol governance: one can disagree with the technical necessity of an upgrade but should not easily challenge rules that have been locked in by formal consensus processes. F2Pool is one of the early Bitcoin mining pools, and pool operators naturally need to balance between developers, node users, exchanges, holders, and miners; outright rejecting a soft fork that has received widespread signal support may expose the blocks produced by their pool to compatibility and economic isolation risks.
The controversy surrounding BIP-54 lies not only in its technical content but also in the "bundling" of the upgrade. Individual fixes can easily build consensus around clear risks, costs, and alternatives; however, placing timestamp, verification complexity, signatures, and historical transaction edge cases into the same proposal forces supporters to accept all changes simultaneously, while opponents may reject the entire package due to dissatisfaction with one aspect. Chun Wang has previously likened such arrangements to bundling bills in politics, arguing that changes to the Bitcoin consensus layer should be minimized, auditable, and subject to independent voting.
Historically, the BIP-9 activation of SegWit demonstrated that miner signals do not equate to complete consensus. The original design of BIP-9 required 95% of blocks to indicate readiness within one difficulty cycle; SegWit did not meet this standard for a long time in 2017 and was ultimately locked in through user-activated soft forks, miner coordination, and mechanisms like BIP-91. Taproot, on the other hand, adopted a shorter time window and a 90% threshold, reaching the target in June 2021 and officially activating in November of the same year.
The capital and security logic of BIP-54 supporters is that early protocol edge defects could be maliciously exploited in the future; the sooner rules are tightened through a compatibility soft fork, the lower the verification costs and attack surface. In contrast, the capital and governance logic of opponents is that the stability of the protocol itself is Bitcoin's most important asset, and any consensus change lacking urgency could create coordination risks greater than vulnerabilities. The two sides are not simply opposed on "whether to upgrade" but are comparing the risks of technical debt against governance debt.
This represents a change in protocol governance outside of regulatory changes. Bitcoin lacks a board, product managers, or statutory voting rights; BIP texts cannot automatically change rules; true rule changes depend on the joint coordination of developers' implementations, miner signals, node deployments, exchange preparations, and the economic majority. Chun Wang's insistence on "first following BIP-9, then reaching an absolute majority" essentially demands that proposals transition from technical debates to measurable, reproducible, and verifiable consensus processes among network participants.
ABAB News · Laws of Cognition
- Protocol upgrades rely on code; activating upgrades relies on coordination.
- Technical debt can be repaired; governance debt is the hardest to repay.
- The correctness of a minority must pass through the validation of a majority.