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Bitcoin => Bitcoin Discussion => Topic started by: johnyj on January 27, 2016, 08:25:55 AM



Title: Soft fork is a deadly virus
Post by: johnyj on January 27, 2016, 08:25:55 AM
A soft fork is a deadly virus, everyone should be extremely careful, since it forcefully turn the old legitimate miners into zombie miners of the network. If soft fork practice gains traction, bitcoin will suffer from soft fork infection from time to time, and eventually die from it  :(

After weeks of research, this is my conclusion, correct me if I'm wrong ;)

A more technical explanation is here:
Why soft fork is a very bad idea and should be avoided at all costs (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1342268.0)


Title: Re: Soft fork is a deadly virus
Post by: SebastianJu on January 27, 2016, 08:41:59 AM
I have read your explaination in the other thread and indeed i think this is a hefty thing to plan. Consensus is something different i think. It is tricking into believing everything is right.

What i ask myself, when the old nodes only see empty blocks, aren't the transactions needed to calculate if the block hash is correct? If the transactions are not seeable then how can the hash be calculated as valid? As far as i remember, changing the transactions of a block will give you another seed part that is used as base to find the block hash.

You write that segwit miner still would need nearly half of the network to do this fork but wouldn't it be sufficient when 10% segwit nodes find a block, let's say a minute before the 90% non segwit nodes, then they propagate it through matt's network? or through other fast connections to all the big miners and these miners can instantly confirm the block because nothing big to be calculated. They would accept the block and that would be it.

Though even then, the old nodes would still think the bitcoins, that were moved in the segwit block, are at the old addresses, wouldn't that mean a fork of some kind has happened because a big part of the network has other details about the status of the bitcoins?

I'm surely not so much into the tech so i might be fully wrong. :P