Author: Stephen Pair 2013-03-13 19:43:15
Published on: 2013-03-13T19:43:15+00:00
In an email exchange between Pieter Wuille and other members of the Bitcoin community, the topic of dropping support for old nodes was discussed. It was deemed unreasonable to put the majority of the network on a fork without discussion. A hard fork to drop the 0.8.1 limit requires widespread community consensus, not just from miners and developers. The email also touched on the market for securing a payment network, with consumers (bitcoin users) and providers (miners) being involved. It was suggested that if the majority of miners stayed on 0.8, the 0.7 fork may have still won out due to providers abandoning a large portion of their customers. However, in reality, the majority of the mining community chose to service both 0.8 and 0.7 users as it was deemed rational. It was also suggested that there would unlikely be multiple forks of any consequence in permanent coexistence and that a successful competitor to Bitcoin would have to arise as a fork of the UTXOs in the block chain.
Updated on: 2023-06-06T11:06:03.252068+00:00