Are There Downsides To Bitcoin Soft Fork Upgrades?
A panel held at Bitcoin 2022 set out to explore the benefits and tradeoffs of activating a Bitcoin soft fork.Despite being known as a protocol that is slow to change, Bitcoin does have its own way to add new functionalities to the network. Soft forks, a type of upgrade that ensures those who don’t use the new software can still participate in the peer-to-peer network, is likely the preferred method to introduce novel features to Bitcoin. However, do soft forks have their downsides? What are the tradeoffs for Bitcoin users?A panel moderated by Ben Perrin, creator of the BTC Sessions YouTube....
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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....
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....
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in favor of a protocol soft fork, a new vulnerability introduced by the update has caused the support to the fork to be withdrawn.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....
In a recent blog post, Peter Todd, one of the more active bitcoin developers, raised the prospects of an amicable end to the so-called “civil war”. Setting out a condition, Todd states: “If major industry players were willing to commit to layer 2 solutions, I’d be willing to support something like a forced soft fork, and I’d be willing to support a coin voting hard fork even if they didn’t.” A forced-soft-fork is similar to an ordinary soft fork, but unupgraded clients won’t be able to spend their funds until they upgrade. However, in an email response, Todd states:....
Griff Green, a spokesman for Slock.it, the team which founded the DAO, says in an interview with CoinTelegraph that he is privy to some of the pool operator’s discussions and they “very much back the soft fork.” However, he doubts pool operators are willing to go on record and publicly support the fork. Responding to potential suggestions of negotiation with the attacker, Green stated: “I'm not personally open to negotiations because with a hard fork we can get all of the ETH back to the people who were attacked.” He further added: “I think there is a general consensus in the Ethereum....