Replying to Avatar Lyn Alden

Question to bitcoin devs or other techies here.

Have there been thoughts about temporary soft forks?

In other words, suppose there is some potential change to bitcoin that there is some difference of opinion in even though it seems solid overall. Rather than permanently tightening the rules (which potentially requires a hard fork to undo, depending on the change), is there a case to consider a temporary soft fork instead? Eg it becomes active for the next 100,000 blocks and then will revert to the prior state for future transactions after that point unless renewed again, temporarily or maybe permanently that time depending on consensus at that point?
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niftynei() 🇺🇸💸🧡 2y ago

what do you do about coins that have locked up funds using features that were deprecated?

bitcoin scripts are essentially user-defined programs, which get run/executed when the bitcoin *are spent*. there is no real going backsies once funds have been locked up to them.

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niftynei() 🇺🇸💸🧡 2y ago

this would be fine if you could prove that no funds on bitcoin made use of any to-be-deprecated features, but bitcoin hides what these programs are (and what features they're using) until spending time.

this means you have absolutely no way to tell what features/opcodes are currently safe-guarding funds.