Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] This thread is not about the soft/hard fork technical debate

From: Dave Scotese <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 5 Oct 2015 13:54:38 -0700

I prefer the hard fork because the complexity introduced by soft forks
scares me.

At
http://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2015-September/011309.html
Gregory wrote: "Security requires a bit of vigilance, inherently." and
[A non-upgraded miner will end up] "*> producing invalid blocks forever
until** the owner shuts it down and upgrades. * This is the outcome
guaranteed for absentee miners with a hard fork, but it is not guaranteed
for a soft fork."

It seems that the main benefit of a soft-fork is that it allows
participants on the network to keep participating even if they aren't
vigilant enough to notice and upgrade when that is safest.  Are there other
reasons that might entice me if that one by itself is not enough?

Gregory provided two more: [Using soft-forks] "radically lowers (in most of
our experience and
opinion) the cost of deployment; again-- making them different. They
prevent a industry wide flag day, and tight release synchronization  which
is harmful to decentralization promoting software diversity."

I understand these benefits.  The cost in complexity is still too high for
me, and I think most of the pain in "cost of deployment", "industry-wide
flag days," and "tight release synchronization," as well as the
centralizing effect of those things can be minimized with waiting periods.
The promotion of software diversity offered by soft-forks is pretty cool,
but that gets close to messing with fungibility.
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