However, some dispute this declaration
as soft forks have the potential to lower the security of nodes that do not upgrade.
Think
of soft fork as an updated version of the protocol which is backward compatible with previous versions.
But they share one significant benefit
with soft forks: extension blocks are backward compatible.
They will switch out modules and
implement soft forks to keep the platform relevant and performing at a high level.
After these phases were complete, it went through the traditional
soft fork implementation process, which can be overseen and participated by anyone in the bitcoin open source network.
The proposal intends to make
soft fork deployment an easier process by allowing multiple forks to be deployed at the same time.
While soft forks are seen as less disruptive in that they're backwards - compatible, they can still be controversial when used to initiate changes not all cryptocurrency users agree with.
This method of deployment allows
multiple soft forks to be rolled out simultaneously, which means improvements can be implemented more quickly.
Soft forks typically have a much smaller effect on the network, because users with older versions can still operate as is.
In the past,
soft forks caused some minimal network disruption, but the risks do seem limited this time around.
That's why we let our miners vote for their preferred hard fork and
soft fork at the same time, and give them an option to combine these votes.
This allows miners to signal when they're ready to enforce the new rules, and it allows you to set up a
parallel soft fork.
And other topics in the poll include questions
about soft forks, as well as governance issues and media consumption.
«I believe that conventional wisdom is wrong,» he wrote in a piece that
argued soft forks have not always gone off without difficulty.
Both soft and hard consensus forks can be used to make complex changes to bitcoin;
soft forks merely require a lower amount of consensus.
However, he also argued that prediction markets could be helpful, not only in determining how users feel about the backwards - incompatible hard forks, but also about less
disruptive soft forks.
Soft forks present a lower risk of splitting the network and for that reason they have been the most commonly used option to upgrade the bitcoin blockchain so far.
The platform is being constructed in layers, which gives the system the flexibility to be more easily maintained and allow for upgrades by way
of soft forks.
In the past,
soft forks caused some (minimal) network disruption, but the risks do seem limited this time around.
As tensions resulting from Bitcoin Unlimited's growing dominance started to boil over, two further proposals soon emerged that has today taken center stage in the scaling debate: a user -
activated soft fork for the «mandatory activation of segwit deployment» as specified in BIP148, and SegWit2x.
Either way, for some users the revelation added to the desire to have the Segregated
Witness soft fork activated on the Bitcoin network.
Similar data has been used to signal readiness
for soft fork upgrades, but it can be also used for AsicBoost and potentially for less obvious things (like internal accounting).
Prior to the activation of the Segregated Witness
soft fork in August 2017, there were concerns about the scalability and malleability of Bitcoin due to the size limit of the blocks and a potential manipulation of the transaction ID.
Wirex will only be supporting the
SegWit soft fork with SegWit enabled wallets; so you send BTC cheaply and quickly!
By April of 2017, this attitude led Litecoin creator Charlie Lee to advocate for a user activated
soft fork on «his» coin.
The main focus was how Bitcoin consensus rules were changed, which is typically
through soft forks and hard forks.
Meanwhile, Zamyatin believes another way to push users to securely move their crypto to resistant addresses is through a backwards - compatible
soft fork upgrade.
In today's relatively centralized mining landscape, where only a small subset of users mine (and an even smaller subset of users control mining pools), very few users can
enforce soft forks.
In Lee's view, this upgrade can be accomplished
via soft fork of the Litecoin blockchian.
Also, to be safe, BIP9, the mechanism used to
deploy soft forks, was specifically designed to mitigate the risk of accidental forks happening.
The «no wallet changes» part sounds rather confusing, which made users wonder if the proposed update is really a hard fork and how it would fit previous
soft fork solutions such as SegWit.
«I think we should do the Segregated Witness
soft fork first,» Voisine said.
«It can be rolled out with a backward
compatible soft fork, which would be even easier if Segregated Witness is activated first.
If the Segregated Witness
soft fork does activate, the LND alpha software could immediately be tested on Bitcoin's main net.
The timeline for that support will be driven by the activation of the
required soft fork,» Pair said, «but we don't know exactly when the activation will occur, so we don't want to spend time now only to have it take another six months or a year before activation happens.»
Past examples of successful
soft forks include software upgrades like BIP 66 (which dealt with signature validation) and P2SH (which altered bitcoin's address formatting).
Finally, no discount at all would have slightly reduced the amount of space available in blocks because of the need to store the witness commitment (about 40 bytes) in the coinbase transaction; since the segregated witness
soft fork allows miners to choose between generating segregated witness style blocks and traditional - style blocks (that can't include segregated witness transactions), this would provide a minor incentive for miners to favor traditional - style blocks.
But while Todd
calls soft forks «one of the best tools» that developers have to upgrade the protocol, even this view has attracted its share of detractors.
Key viewpoints shared by Cohen included a preference for
soft forks over hard forks, blaming bitcoin miners for blocking Segregated Witness (SegWit), and what he views as unwarranted vitriol aimed at the Bitcoin Core contributors.
The
current soft fork implement is, by all accounts, the most tested piece of code to ever make it into Bitcoin.
«The initial proposal of the lightning network required some new features, that required at least a [
soft fork], pushing any real implementation many months or even years into the future,» notes Jerratsch.
A purist argument against Wuille's proposal is that a Segregated Witness
soft fork constitutes an «ugly» workaround of code.
For this and other reasons, the Bitcoin Core development team
prefers soft forks over hard forks, which require a synchronized network - wide switch of all users.