Author: Mike Hearn 2015-09-28 14:51:22
Published on: 2015-09-28T14:51:22+00:00
The author is responding to a question about the security risks associated with soft-forks in the context of Bitcoin. The risk with soft-forks is that miners may build invalid blocks on top of the best work chain, rather than an ignored lower work side chain, which exposes users to payment fraud. Hard forks, on the other hand, collect all the blocks by miners that are no longer checking all the rules together on a side chain after the split, and wallets know how to ignore that chain. The author argues that making OP_NOPs non-standard does not solve this problem because miners have always been able to modify or bypass the IsStandard function without affecting the validity of their blocks. The author questions the purpose of doing things this way and asks where the gain is for ordinary Bitcoin users.
Updated on: 2023-06-10T23:09:51.749396+00:00