Author: Eric Voskuil 2017-11-11 19:51:04
Published on: 2017-11-11T19:51:04+00:00
The discussion thread begins with Devrandom's description of a hard fork as a situation where non-upgraded nodes reject a block mined and relayed by upgraded nodes. Peter Todd points out that the proposed change is not a hard fork because even if the new rule causes rejection of blocks that are not rejected by old rules, it does not meet all the conditions of a hard fork. A soft fork, on the other hand, involves a consensus fork wherein everything that was previously invalid remains invalid while blocks that would have previously been considered valid become invalid. In this case, the proposal is for a soft-fork introduction of a new proof-of-work (POW). Eric Voskuil argues that if a block that would be discarded under previous rules becomes accepted after a rule addition, there is no reason to not simply call the new rule a hard fork. According to him, it's perfectly rational to consider a weaker block as "invalid" relative to the strong chain. He believes that it is ultimately what matters. Paul Sztorc agrees with Peter Todd's comments. Devrandom presents his proposal for a soft-fork introduction of a new POW, which he describes as a semi-hard change. The proposal aims to mitigate centralization pressures by introducing a POW that does not have economies of scale and to introduce an intermediary confirmation point, reducing the impact of mining power fluctuations. However, in reality, there is no way to know if/when people would adopt this rule. What matters in the proposal is that people who do adopt it are well aware of its ability to split them from the existing economy.
Updated on: 2023-06-12T21:54:21.846658+00:00