Author: Alex Morcos 2017-03-26 11:27:30
Published on: 2017-03-26T11:27:30+00:00
The lack of precision and consistency in discussing soft forks versus hard forks has led to a lot of different arguments. The technical definition of a soft fork is slippery, and miners should not be able to enforce it because they lack both the right and ability. Soft forks require nodes to enforce rules to make them permanent, whereas miners can only censor certain classes of transactions. While there are differences between soft forks and hard forks with regard to consensus requirements and safety for rolling them out, soft forks should still have a high bar for consensus. The new version bits soft fork rollout mechanism allows proposals to expire harmlessly if support for them is lacking. The vast majority of the community is in favor of segwit, and no business contacted was opposed to it; however, if a significant minority opposes segwit or any other fork, it should not be forced on them. There is some logic behind the idea that soft forks are opt-in, but the subtleties involved make it difficult to make strong statements about them.
Updated on: 2023-06-11T22:32:12.944397+00:00