Author: Adam Back 2015-08-17 14:36:48
Published on: 2015-08-17T14:36:48+00:00
In a recent email thread, Eric Lombrozo addressed the issue of the proposed hard fork and the risks associated with it. He noted that Bitcoin has never attempted anything closely resembling a hard fork like what's being proposed and that it is very hard to change the rules of Satoshi's protocol. Even uncontroversial soft forks have had problems in the past and required goodwill cooperation between developers and mining pool operators to fix. Lombrozo argued that attempting a hard fork mechanism that’s never been done before in such a politically divisive environment is risky as we're risking billions of dollars' worth of other people's money. He urged people to see the bigger picture here and understand that nobody is trying to stop anyone from doing anything out of some desire for maintaining control. He believes that goodwill amongst network participants is more important than trying to push some pet feature some of us want.However, some contributors are supporting the proposal by Bitcoin-XT, which is both a hard-fork and a soft-fork. It's a hard-fork on Bitcoin full-nodes but also a soft-fork attack on Bitcoin core SPV nodes that did not opt-in. It exposes those SPV nodes to loss in the likely event that Bitcoin-XT results in a network-split. The recent proposal to run noXT (patch to falsely claim to mine on XT while actually rejecting its blocks) could add enough uncertainty about the activation that Bitcoin-XT would probably have to be aborted.
Updated on: 2023-06-10T20:01:23.539201+00:00