Bitcoin Has a Political Problem as Soft Fork Becomes Popularity Contest
Like the recent US election, tensions within the Bitcoin Community have run high for the better parts of 2015 and 2016 as a rather-minor code change (known as the ‘block size debate’) has become a political race for competing factions, some of which have non-developers as spokespeople pushing an alternative to Bitcoin’s core client, Bitcoin Core. In the past for the Bitcoin Core team, soft forks have not prevented much of an obstacle, but not the block size. It bewilders some among the Core team, how devs with such little experience have commanded such a share of dialogue despite....
Related News
The Ethereum community has a lot to decide lately as the network has been preparing for an upcoming soft fork expected to start roughly around June 30. According to Etherchain.org pools who have implemented the soft fork are showing consensus for the procedure. With the Ethereum community planning on the next step another revelation from Hacking, Distributed shows the soft fork may be vulnerable to DoSing. Is a Blacklisting Soft Fork a Good Idea? Some Say No. In an editorial written by Tjaden Hess and additional research done by River Keefer, and Emin Gün Sirer the Hacking, Distributed....
The soft fork proposed to fix the sticky situation The DAO has dragged the Ethereum community into is here, and is a perhaps disproportionately drastic to the problem. The proposed solution to the DAO attack is to freeze all funds in the contract by blacklisting the hashes that correspond to the stored Ether. Want to withdraw funds from the DAO or “split” from the failed experiment? Be prepared to do so on an alternate Blockchain. Soft Fork Praised Within, Decried by Ethereum ‘Outsiders’. The interesting facet of this development is the recent update to the blacklisting methodology being....
With $250 million on the line, Ethereum is moving at lightspeed as the latest unsybilable miner voting shows they almost unanimously back the fork, with more than 90% in favor. Gavin Wood, founder of Ethcore, the company that develops Parity, one of Ethereum’s clients, confirmed the soft-fork has been merged stating: “[T]he development branch of the Parity codebase now includes some functionality to allow miners to block certain transactions.” The softfork is still waiting to be merged in Go, the Ethereum client used by most users. Jeffrey Wilcke, an ethereum founder and lead developer of....
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....
The DAO debacle continues, after the miner community voted in favor of a protocol soft fork, a new vulnerability introduced by the update has caused the support to the fork to be withdrawn. Geth's 1.4.8 version could allow an attacker to SPAM and effectively freeze the whole Ethereum network. The Ethereum Foundation has introduced a new Geth client version (1.4.9) that rolls back the changes made in the previous soft-fork-enabled software. A security alert was issued by Ethereum Foundation. In the announcement, the developer Felix Lange explained: An attack vector has been identified in....