Compatibility requirements for hard or soft forks



Summary:

A strategy to ensure the safe use of Bitcoin involves creating an informational BIP (Bitcoin Improvement Proposal). According to a message sent by Tier Nolan via bitcoin-dev in November 2015, guidelines for this proposal include increasing transaction version numbers when possible, considering transactions with unknown/large version numbers as unsafe to use with locktime, and providing reasonable notice before implementing changes. Non-opt-in changes should only be made to protect the network's integrity. Transactions that can be validated without overburdening the network are considered safe to use, even if they are non-standard. However, an OP_CAT script that requires terabytes of RAM to validate is not considered "reasonable."


Updated on: 2023-06-11T00:47:50.846160+00:00