If you could hard fork Bitcoin right now, what changes would you make?

[FinneysTrueVision]

I would only improve it's fungibility which would make it an even better form of money than it currently is.

[1714991583]

1714991583

[NavI_027]

the change I would do is to make it unforkable!

I like your suggestion! We no longer need to create more hardforks because couple of it are already existing and it is enough. Besides, it might become a strong competitor of btc in the future. We don't want to see the pioneer not lying on the top, right?

Don't get me wrong, tx fees and other lack of features of bitcoin s*cks. But at the end of the day, it's mother of all crypto which I get used to . Among the coins in the market, my biggest respect is into it.

I would only improve it's fungibility which would make it an even better form of money than it currently is.

Bitcoin bought here in my country can be interchange with the bitcoin bought there in yours because they are identical and both part of the whole 21 million supply. Hmm, what do you mean exactly of the word "fungibility"?

[mk4]

one of the biggest selling points of altcoins like XRP and EOS to the less-knowledgeable people is their "cheap price".

It is a selling point for those coins but it cannot be implemented in bitcoin as it will destroy the market and billions of dollars are at stake and the developers will not mess with that knowing the consequences .

I'm curious, how will that actually "destroy the market"? It's pretty much like a stock split, which is in no way damaging at all, it just makes it more "price friendly" in the perspective of the masses. In fact, this doesn't even need to be changed through a soft fork. This can easily be changed on the client-side without touching the actual blockchain's codebase.

[Yogee]

the change I would do is to make it unforkable!

I like your suggestion! We no longer need to create more hardforks because couple of it are already existing and it is enough.

We cannot expect zero changes or updates to be made in the software.
We cannot expect everyone involved in the network to agree all the time.

Anyone can also copy the codes because it's open source.

[bitsurfer2014]

the change I would do is to make it unforkable!

I like your suggestion! We no longer need to create more hardforks because couple of it are already existing and it is enough. Besides, it might become a strong competitor of btc in the future. We don't want to see the pioneer not lying on the top, right?

Don't get me wrong, tx fees and other lack of features of bitcoin s*cks. But at the end of the day, it's mother of all crypto which I get used to . Among the coins in the market, my biggest respect is into it.

Yup! Too many BTC clones would eventually dilute the crypto market and at the same time fraudsters are using its popularity in creating would be BTC alter egos that are eventually used to commit illicit schemes as evident by most BTC clones that offers no real feature compared to its original.

This in turn contributes to the negative perception of some people towards BTC and other cryptocurrencies that is why they are hesitant to join the crypto bandwagon. Imho.

[Wind_FURY]

If I could hardfork Bitcoin right now and had the technical capability to further develop it, the change I would do is to make it unforkable!

How? Why? What about upgrades, and improvements like Schnorr and Taproot?

I believe everyone can agree that Bitcoin will need to hard fork, as a final option, if it went to a choice of life or death for the network.

[bitsurfer2014]

If I could hardfork Bitcoin right now and had the technical capability to further develop it, the change I would do is to make it unforkable!

How? Why? What about upgrades, and improvements like Schnorr and Taproot?

I believe everyone can agree that Bitcoin will need to hard fork, as a final option, if it went to a choice of life or death for the network.

If I'm not mistaken, those upgrades and improvements you've mentioned could often be implemented by core developers with a soft fork except for some upgrades that really need hard forking.

With this, I was implying that Bitcoin could not be hard forked with any other entities/developers like what happened to Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin Gold, etc... other than Bitcoin's core developers since they can do a hard fork should there will be a need to do so. Imho.

[yazher]

I am not a technical guy but I would suggest to work on improving the speed of Tx and have a cap in fees. There are people out there who pays crazy fees and force others to follow them too if the tx is urgent to get at-least one confirmation.

Yeah! this is one of the major problems some are facing when they don't have their own BTC wallet. When they only using exchanges wallet, they force to go with the flow about the exchange's transaction fees and it varies from time to time especially when the BTC price is rising. I have encountered this kind of problem when I don't have enough transaction fees to move my BTC and wait for the price to subside to successfully execute my transaction with enough transaction fees.

[kryptqnick]

I am not a technical guy but I would suggest to work on improving the speed of Tx and have a cap in fees. There are people out there who pays crazy fees and force others to follow them too if the tx is urgent to get at-least one confirmation.

Same here. If there's something that can be done to solve the scalability issue via hard fork, I would go for it. I would also go for fixing what will inevitably have to be fixed eventually (the bug is widely discussed in this thread). Moreover, I would think of implementing procedures required to block the addresses that are known to belong to scammers (blocking the address and not accepting any transactions from it onto the network would be a decision requiring some sort of consensus apart from strong evidence in order to limit the possibility of abuse). I would also divide satoshis into smaller units just in case there comes a time when it will come in handy.

[DooMAD]

Moreover, I would think of implementing procedures required to block the addresses that are known to belong to scammers (blocking the address and not accepting any transactions from it onto the network would be a decision requiring some sort of consensus apart from strong evidence in order to limit the possibility of abuse).

I dunno... that one feels like it needs a "slippery slope" argument in response. 

The total inability to freeze payments is considered a fundamental tenet by some.  Fungibility is also an important consideration we need to be careful not to screw with.  Not to mention that creating a method in which to determine "guilt" in a decentralised fashion, that couldn't be tampered with, corrupted or gamed, and that didn't involve elevating a person or group to a position of authority to act as judge or jury seems an unfathomable conundrum to solve first.

[Wind_FURY]

If I could hardfork Bitcoin right now and had the technical capability to further develop it, the change I would do is to make it unforkable!

How? Why? What about upgrades, and improvements like Schnorr and Taproot?

I believe everyone can agree that Bitcoin will need to hard fork, as a final option, if it went to a choice of life or death for the network.

If I'm not mistaken, those upgrades and improvements you've mentioned could often be implemented by core developers with a soft fork except for some upgrades that really need hard forking.

But Bitcoin might need to hard fork in the future, WHEN there comes a life or death situation for the network. If it's life or death, I believe the upgrade will get consensus, and won't split the network in two.

With this, I was implying that Bitcoin could not be hard forked with any other entities/developers like what happened to Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin Gold, etc... other than Bitcoin's core developers since they can do a hard fork should there will be a need to do so. Imho.

They're shitcoins forever, never Bitcoin. Litecoin has as much claim as Bitcoin Cash/SV/Gold to be Bitcoin, zero.

[davis196]

I'm not a tech savvy person,but I would change two things in my hardforked version of Bitcoin.
All the complex mathematical tasks that are executed during BTC mining should be used for something useful.
I don't know what exactly.Maybe there is a way for scientists to use the enormous power of the Bitcoin miners.
Another thing is to somewhat reduce the electricity costs of BTC mining.I don't know how this can be achieved,but that such innovation would be great.

[ChiBitCTy]

This is a really good questions and I guess it really all depends on what the coins is going to be used for/ main purpose.  For one I would make sure that there are no full privacy aspects associated with the coin, do something to try and speed up tx's.  Somehow I would also like to make bitcoin more centralized.  I think with the Dev team, there is absolutely an aspect of centralization.  I'm not sure how to change that, if even possible, however.

[royalfestus]

i bet you that most of those that sponsored hardfork in the past are regretting it. Everything they plan to add to bitcoin might have succeeded but they are no more bitcoin again, are not not relevent. I dont think anonymity holds any big importance in the coin and reactions by government and organisation reduces any support. A lot had been done to make transaction faster and safe but I want bitcoin to be more engaged in daily exchange for goods everywhere.

[jpnl0006]

If you had consensus to make whatever changes you saw fit in Bitcoin right now with a hard fork and the community was 100% behind you, what changes would you make? What improvements do you think Bitcoin needs through a hard fork?

Would you update scaling, security, consensus protocol, programmability/smart contracts, other stuff? Give details.

I think the major challenge rocking the space now is the challenges with scalability in Bitcoin. If i had the priviledge of hard forking bitcoin i wil change the transactions per second of bitcoin as it is the major concern for users transacting via the bitcoin framework.

[pooya87]

there are some nonsense in bitcoin consensus rules that aren't really important but they are still nonsense and need fixing.

for example the way sigops are being counted is horrible and any hard fork must address this, they should stop counting sigops of coinbase signature scripts, they should start counting sigops of multi-sig OPs correctly instead of jumping to 20 each time it doesn't match the expectation or if it is in a pubkey script instead of redeem scripts,...

there are also some restrictions that should be placed on scripts specifically pubkey scripts such as their length which can be anything since they are not evaluated.
there are also some restrictions that i would place for OP codes like checksig ones that should fail if they get an invalid public key.

there are also a bunch of standard rules enforced by bitcoin core that in my opinion must become consensus rules instead and they can happen in a hard fork. eg. minimal push (for numbers), push only (for signature scripts), clean stack (after execution of the script), minimal if (use OP_TRUE/False only),...

P.S. note that unlike most suggestions here all of these changes are both possible and easy to implement and nobody can really oppose them either, like sigop counting mechanism.

[Namiks]

I think the only thing I'd want to consider really changing is the mining. I really miss the days of CPU/GPU mining bitcoin. It would be nice to see more coins come back with CPU/GPU PoW algorithms, avoiding presales, premines, and the centralisation that comes with them. I don't hate ASIC mining, I just find that their prices are utterly insane and the noise in addition is just too much for any regular folk to have sitting around.

[Warkop]

I am not a technical guy but I would suggest to work on improving the speed of Tx and have a cap in fees. There are people out there who pays crazy fees and force others to follow them too if the tx is urgent to get at-least one confirmation.

It seems like this is a very good idea, I would also do the same as you if it happened to me, it looks very real for the current transaction fees are very high, this should really be resolved in a very good way so that everyone who wants Doing less transactions does not suffer losses at such high costs today.

[Debonaire217]

Yeah! this is one of the major problems some are facing when they don't have their own BTC wallet. When they only using exchanges wallet, they force to go with the flow about the exchange's transaction fees and it varies from time to time especially when the BTC price is rising. I have encountered this kind of problem when I don't have enough transaction fees to move my BTC and wait for the price to subside to successfully execute my transaction with enough transaction fees.

That is the problem with exchanges and I think, not really with bitcoin even though the fees in bitcoin is really high, exchanges should not put more burden for small traders, those that haven't really have a huge amount of funds to trade.

Perhaps, fixing this problem will just make it easier for small traders to withdraw funds because instead of trading their funds to cryptos that have a small transaction fees, they can already withdraw their funds in BTC.

Outside of an exchange, I don't think Bitcoin tx fee's aren't too bad, since I could adjust the sats/byte to the amount that I want. The only problem is the time it takes for my transaction to be confirmed in the blockchain.

[Wind_FURY]

I'm not a tech savvy person,but I would change two things in my hardforked version of Bitcoin.
All the complex mathematical tasks that are executed during BTC mining should be used for something useful.
I don't know what exactly.Maybe there is a way for scientists to use the enormous power of the Bitcoin miners.
Another thing is to somewhat reduce the electricity costs of BTC mining.I don't know how this can be achieved,but that such innovation would be great.

The more you understand "why" Proof of Work is, in Bitcoin, I believe the more you would understand why the "waste of energy", in Bitcoin, is a "something useful" in itself.

Bitcoin Proof of Work solved the Byzantine General's Problem. Proof of Work is Bitcoin's true foundation, not blockchain.