Author: Andrew C 2016-10-28 15:28:35
Published on: 2016-10-28T15:28:35+00:00
The email thread discusses the notion that soft forks do not force Bitcoin users to upgrade software, but in reality they do. Miners and users who want to make transactions using old rules are no longer able to do so if the rules have been tightened through soft forks. Tightening of rules builds up pressure for a split in the network to occur, which can be dangerous as it leads to creating two coins when before there was only one. The previous BIP 66 hard fork was due to greedy miners who were SPV mining, not "sloppy deployment" by the devs. The upcoming Segregated Witness soft fork is also discussed, with conflicting messages regarding whether all non-segwit transactions will still validate blocks and whether miners mining non-segwit blocks will be ignored. The proposal is made to remove all previously "soft forked" rules for non-segwit transactions and to require them only for segwit transactions, making segwit optional. However, this would require a hard fork and would result in a loss of functionality and various bug fixes. The idea of creating a new client called Bitcoin Authentic is proposed, but is met with little interest from other participants in the thread.
Updated on: 2023-06-11T20:29:24.768045+00:00