Soft Fork to Increase the 21M Limit?

[johnyj]

Noway this will make it an alt-coin

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Prohibited_changes

In fact I'm surprised when Pieter promote this soft fork trick. It is cunning and stealthy, not a formal way to implement change, it is very like trying to find the security hole in core software and exploit to reach hacker's desire: Let's see is there any more things that we can do without being discovered by old core clients

In fact if you are a honest dev, you should immediately take measures to patch such kind of security weakness, not exploit it

[RoadTrain]

Noway this will make it an alt-coin

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Prohibited_changes

In fact I'm surprised when Pieter promote this soft fork trick. It is cunning and stealthy, not a formal way to implement change, it is very like trying to find the security hole in core software and exploit to reach hacker's desire: Let's see is there any more things that we can do without being discovered by old core clients

In fact if you are a honest dev, you should immediately take measures to patch such kind of security weakness, not exploit it

Soft forks are a feature of Bitcoin. I don't see any way we can technically prohibit them within Bitcoin's architecture. Moreover, soft forks can be enforced by miners unilaterally, without others consent. That's because soft forks make rules more strict/add new rules, and these rules are enforced by miners.

[fbueller]

Quorum? There is no voting for a soft fork. Miners either upgrade their client or do not. In a soft fork, all old nodes can see the new blocks, can still have transactions sent to addresses that they recognize, and can spend their existing coins.

Yes there is.. Soft-forks only reach super-majority (and the feature switched on) if the block versions produced by miners reaches reach a number indicating the change. 95% of 1250 concurrent blocks is the exact mechanism - miners have full choice over what software they run.

[johnyj]

Quorum? There is no voting for a soft fork. Miners either upgrade their client or do not. In a soft fork, all old nodes can see the new blocks, can still have transactions sent to addresses that they recognize, and can spend their existing coins.

Yes there is.. Soft-forks only reach super-majority (and the feature switched on) if the block versions produced by miners reaches reach a number indicating the change. 95% of 1250 concurrent blocks is the exact mechanism - miners have full choice over what software they run.

This 95% rule is also a rule that can be changed at will, nothing enforce it. If I'm a large mining pool, I will trigger it with even one block and start to produce new blocks immediately

It seems the last defense is exchanges, if exchanges do not upgrade to new software, then all the coins from those new blocks will worth nothing and become useless. You can setup a new exchange for exchanging those new coins, then most possibly they will become some kind of alt-coin exchange with neglectable USD value/volume

I think this is the biggest weakness of bitcoin, e.g. no systematic way to secure the rules from being modified, thus make the software itself a single point of failure

The only measurement we have today is a FOMC like commiter's group, and there is no clear guidance in their decision making, and Gmaxwell has already resigned

[ZoomT]

Recent advancements such as "Segregated Witness" by Pieter Wuille and "Drivechain" by Paul Sztorc showed the power and flexibility enabled by soft forks. But the same technique can also be used to effectively raise the 21M limit, by issuing "soft-fork-currencies" (SFCs) whose protocol rules are the same as those of cryptocurrencies.

A miner majority (i.e. like a softfork) can force changes to the Bitcoin protocol using the method described here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1296628.0

The above proposal was for blocksize limit increases (mildly controversial), but the same idea could in principle be used for other changes that would otherwise require a hardfork.