Bitcoin Forum

Bitpay CEO on Safe Bitcoin Scaling: Soft Fork First, Hard Fork Next

Over the past few months, Bitpay co-founder and CEO Stephen Pair has been advocating for a safe and non-contentious method to scale the Bitcoin network. In an informative blog post, Pair revealed his perception of a cautious approach to bitcoin scaling.

Basically, Pair believes that a soft fork-based scalability solution is the most beneficial for the network and community. It eliminates the possibility of a hard fork, which will inevitably lead to a chain split at this phase of bitcoin development. While some hard forks such as the Ethereum forks executed in late 2016 allowed the network to facilitate changes in a safe manner, with the current tension between Segregated Witness (Segwit) and Bitcoin Unlimited communities, a split chain is inevitable if a hard fork breaks out.

He wrote:

“One very important challenge we must resolve is how to successfully upgrade Bitcoin in a safe, deliberate and non-contentious manner. And we must be able to upgrade Bitcoin because no organism can live in its own waste products.”`

For Pair, the optimal scaling method is to start with the activation of a soft fork to enforce new rules into the network. Then, the developers can initiate another soft fork to deprecate the use of the old block and lastly, execute a non-contentious hard fork to drop the old block and adopt the secondary block as the primary block structure.

Full Read Here: https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/bitpay-ceo-safe-bitcoin-scaling-soft-fork-first-hard-fork-next/ (https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/bitpay-ceo-safe-bitcoin-scaling-soft-fork-first-hard-fork-next/)

That actually sounds like a good idea.

I've been wanting to take the risk of saying this myself (i.e. "remove/deprecate the use of blocks that accept P2PKH & P2SH") for months now, but the Bitcoin trolls were too likely to start shrieking "TH1EF BAGGINS!!! YOU STEAL SATOSH1S COINS, A THIEF!!!!"


So I've kept my mouth shut.

But Pair is right, the current P2PKH and P2SH key pair types can't stay for ever, not least because they can be abused with Sigops DoS attacks (which are not so serious, but really that sort of thing needs cleaning up)


It should not be done quickly. Giving everyone more than enough time to do so without having to pay extortionate fees would be the ideal (so probably at least 12 months before the 1st soft fork). Then everyone can get a perfectly resonable chance to move their coins to the Segwit address formats, and the truth is, Satoshi really needs to: his BTC are not protected by P2PKH, but to a much older type of address that is insecure from brute forcing: P2PK (i.e. pay to public key only)

If people want to protect Satoshi or whoever else's BTC, creating the incentive to ridding the blockchain of P2PK addresses is vital. If you can't accept that, you're a hypocrite, QED