Author: Tier Nolan 2015-12-20 15:30:09
Published on: 2015-12-20T15:30:09+00:00
On December 20, 2015, Natanael sent an email discussing the technicalities of a soft fork in the blockchain. The total difficulty and ratio for full blocks to candidate blocks were discussed, with the conclusion that the same total difficulty is maintained but miners are throwing away otherwise valid blocks. While all new blocks are valid according to the old rule, upgraded miners are at a disadvantage and someone with 15% of the network power has a majority of the effective hashing power. However, the slow roll-out helps mitigate this by giving non-upgraded clients time to react. The main differences in the soft fork are that there's a public key identifier the miners are told about in advance and expect to see in block templates, and that now the pool has to publish this commitment value together with the block that also contains the commitment hash, and that this is verified together with the PoW. It was argued that public keys are not strictly required and registering them with DNSSEC is unnecessary, and instead, they can be published on a website and used for identity.
Updated on: 2023-06-11T02:32:32.892311+00:00