Author: ZmnSCPxj 2017-09-15 04:01:47
Published on: 2017-09-15T04:01:47+00:00
The question of whether soft forks can be prevented is explored in this email thread. The writer suggests that it is impossible to prevent anyone-can-spend outputs, as there are too many potential scriptPubKey options available. Soft forks apply further restrictions on Bitcoin, while hard forks do not, and if a majority of miners were to run soft-forking code which the rest of us were not privy to, we would not be able to detect it. It is thus possible that we may already be in a soft fork whose rules we do not know. The only way to prevent soft forks is to hard fork against them, as Bcash did. The writer also explores the idea of creating a cryptocurrency with immutable consensus rules, which would offer investors great certainty and predictability. However, they note that hard forks are always possible, and that soft forks tend to drag people along with them, even those who oppose the changes and never upgrade.
Updated on: 2023-06-12T18:45:41.110532+00:00