Author: Jorge Timón 2015-09-28 23:17:15
Published on: 2015-09-28T23:17:15+00:00
In a discussion about the benefits and drawbacks of softforks and hardforks in blockchain technology, Mike Hearn via bitcoin-dev explained that in a hardfork there is no mechanism to stop the old fork and two chains can coexist for a long time. He also noted that assuming the hashrate majority upgrades, in the case of a softfork non-upgraded miners will try to build on top of the longest chain (the upgraded one) but their blocks will get consistently orphaned for having a too old block version. On the other hand, in the case of a hardfork, the non-upgraded miners will keep on building their own longest valid chain. However, he acknowledged that there are cases when a feature can be implemented as a softfork or a hardfork, and in those cases a hardfork may be preferable. He recommended providing feedback on bip99, which covers possible consensus rule changes scenarios and a recommended deployment path for each of them, while noting that this discussion about the general desirability of softforks seems off-topic for the concrete cltv deployment discussion, which assumes softforks as the deployment mechanism.
Updated on: 2023-06-10T23:17:59.215211+00:00