Reinventing the Fed: Why Jeff Garzik, Vitalik Buterin Are Against Soft Forks
Bitcoin Core developer and Bloq co-founder Jeff Garzik expresses his opposition on soft forks and its mechanism in which a few group of developers are granted the authority to decide major economic changes which are applied and implemented into the Bitcoin network. To begin with, soft forks are forward compatible in the sense that old nodes will recognize new blocks as valid. A soft fork requires only a majority of the miners to upgrade to the network rules or face security reduction. Centralization. The centralization issue emerges during the process of submitting and implementing a soft....
Related News
Since the beginning of the development of Segregated Witness, an increasing number of alternative Bitcoin hard fork supporters have criticized the implementation process of soft forks on Bitcoin Core, claiming that Core developers have a complete monopoly over the process. Former Bitcoin Core developer Jeff Garzik and Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin particularly stated that proposed soft forks have to undergo a majority consensus among Bitcoin Core developers that ultimately decide whether a soft fork becomes implemented into the BItcoin network. “Soft forks very specifically, from an....
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has summarized the implications of soft and hard forks amid growing tensions surrounding Bitcoin’s future. “...There is an essential difference between hard forks and soft forks: hard forks are opt-in, whereas soft forks allow users no “opting” at all,” he wrote earlier this week. The Bitcoin price was under downward pressure Friday as the community awaits Chinese regulatory announcements and indecisiveness over SegWit and Bitcoin Unlimited continues. After Unlimited succumbed to a bug earlier in the week, rhetoric between the opposing sides became even....
Jeff Garzik, a core bitcoin developer who previously worked as Principal Software Engineer at RedHat before leaving to work full time on bitcoin development, stated in a public video that softforks are a rule by a “tiny, few technocratic elite.” The talk addressed the downsides of segwit “since only the upsides are promoted heavily,” by firstly arguing that repeated soft forks are repeated collusion. Garzik states: “Repeated softforks are repeated agreements, a positive collusion, of these tiny few, to change the rules that the entire network is locked in.” Garzik states that node....
Bitcoin Core, an “open source software project that is a direct descendant of the original Bitcoin implementation”, released a statement late last week on its website. The main focus was how Bitcoin consensus rules were changed, which is typically through soft forks and hard forks. Hard forks and soft forks do virtually the same thing, so Bitcoin Core argues that soft forks are to be preferred as they do not cause the amount of harm on the Bitcoin network as a hard fork can potentially do since users can choose to upgrade to new features when they want to, or remain or the current Bitcoin....
Segregated Witness (Segwit), proposed as a solution to bitcoin’s block size debate, is 99% a full proposal, a development that hasn’t occurred without some controversy. Many expect Segwit to increase the volume of transactions without altering the block size. The change will ultimately be triggered with a soft fork, in which the majority of the nodes have to update to make the change compatible with older software versions. The method by which the proposal has been advanced has been called political by some, including Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum. Segwit’s Benefits. Unlike other....