Understanding Soft Forks: A Core Developer’s View on Network Monopoly

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....

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....

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....

As opposing sides in Bitcoin's long-lasting scaling dispute seem to be inching closer, one of the remaining sources of contention is not whether, but how to achieve a small block size bump. TheBitcoin Core development team wants to increase the maximum block capacity through a Segregated Witness soft fork, which has since been embraced by a large part of Bitcoin’s development community and a significant segment of the Bitcoin industry. Others, like CEO of major payment processor BitPay Stephen Pair, believe the perceived benefits of soft forks over hard forks are being overstated. Speaking....

Bitcoin Core 0.12.1 was released early this morning and the update includes several changes that have huge implications for Bitcoin scalability. The release deploys the first soft fork on the Bitcoin network to use the methodology outlined in BIP 9 (Version Bits), which allows multiple soft forks to take place at the same time. The three BIPs (BIP 68, BIP 112 and BIP 113) included in Bitcoin Core 0.12.1 have huge implications for the Lightning Network, which many believe to be Bitcoin’s best chance for long-term scalability. Although the code for the soft fork has been deployed, miners....