Subject: [bitcoin-dev] The Soft Fork Deception

From: Andrew <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 27 Oct 2016 15:38:17 +0000

I have been reading recently through the history of soft forks provided by
Bitcoin Core:
https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/43538/where-can-i-find-a-record-of-blockchain-soft-forks
.

It has led me to think that there is a deceiving notion that soft forks do
not force Bitcoin users to upgrade software. Yes, it's true that the past
soft forks still allow old nodes to accept blocks under the tighter rules
as valid, but what about miners who are still using old software? What
about users who want to make a transaction using the old rules? Those
people are no longer able to do those things. And if they want to do those
things, a hard fork will result.

Remember what happened when BIP 66 was activated? Luckily, it was short
lived, but this is just the beginning. If you keep tightening the rules,
you are building up more and more pressure for a split in the network to
occur. You can call this split a "hard fork" or just a "fork", but it is
dangerous either way, and it leads to basically the creation of two coins
when before we just had one, people instantly lose value, and the trust in
Bitcoin's store of value dies.

Obviously every one can debate about what should be the definition of a
soft fork, but whatever that is, I think it is unacceptable how sloppily
the past soft forks have been deployed. I can think of many ways in which
we could have these new features that the soft forks provided, but without
forcing the new rules, and simply making them features that can be used on
an individual miner or transaction signer basis. Is there a document from
Bitcoin Core that outlines the philosophy of soft forks and why it is
acceptable to force the tightening of rules and cause such risks? And
please give me another reason other than "it removes a few if statements
from the code".

Now that Segregated witness is scheduled to be deployed on November 15, we
should take a look at this "soft fork" as well. I like the idea of
Segregated Witness, but from conversations on Reddit and IRC, I see people
saying that this soft fork will be like the others: requiring a hard fork
in order to revert it. Is this true? I am getting conflicting messages by
reading the BIP. It says that if all transactions are non-segwit, then a
node will validate the block as before. But if we pass the threshhold
(usually 95 % for 1000 blocks) will miners mining non-segwit blocks be
ignored? This is not good... I really think we should make it optional.
Miners will have an incentive to mine segwit blocks, since it allows for
more transactions per block, so why force them? What if we want to slightly
modify the Segwit protocol in the future? What if we want to replace segwit
with something much different? We will be forced to do a hard fork in order
to do that.

Now, we can't go back in time and fix the deployment of the soft forks, but
I do propose one clean way to fix things: Remove all the previously "soft
forked" rules for non segwit transactions, and require them only for segwit
transactions. But make segwit optional! In addition to what I talked about
above, this may also relieve some tensions of people who are not
comfortable with segwit and are thinking of joining a hard fork like the
Bitcoin Unlimited project.

Unless people can give me a good explanation as to why we are deploying
soft forks in such forceful manner, or Bitcoin Core accepts my proposal,
then I will have no choice but to create a new client (I'm thinking to call
it Bitcoin Authentic), that will be just as Bitcoin Core but will always
follow the chain with the most work regardless of whether soft fork rules
are respected, and I would put at least CHECKLOCKTIMEVERIFY as mandatory
within segwit transactions.

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