Author: Gareth Williams 2017-03-06 23:23:47
Published on: 2017-03-06T23:23:47+00:00
A hashpower activated soft fork is described as a method of censoring transactions in response to a user activated soft fork that the majority of hashpower disagrees with. However, it is possible for the majority of hashpower to censor transactions that they disagree with, which can be viewed as an attack by users who may then respond with a POW hard fork. The success of Bitcoin depends on the majority of hashpower not being hostile to the users.According to David Vorick via bitcoin-dev, user activated soft forks, or economically forced soft forks, are tools used when miners are in opposition to the broader economy. However, Edmund Edgar argues that this tool may not work for new features as miners can simply orphan non-standard transactions affected by the proposed rule change. In the case of SegWit, miners would orphan any transaction that looks like a SegWit transaction, valid or not, thus rendering the soft-fork a de-facto hard-fork. Edgar suggests that user activated soft forks are interesting where meaningful action can be taken by forcing specific transactions through on a once-off basis. For example, if the Chinese government identified an address belonging to Uighur separatists and leaned on Chinese miners to prevent anything from that address confirming, users could say "If these utxos are not spent by block X, your block is invalid." Finally, he adds that user activated soft forks might also be useful for feature upgrades in a world where mining is decentralized and upgrades are fighting against inertia rather than opposition.
Updated on: 2023-06-11T21:54:09.665828+00:00