Replying to Avatar waxwing

With the drama of BIP444 I've seen a lot of people confused about the nature of soft-fork vs hard-fork. This might help:

Back in the block size war we had a lot of similar confusion, mostly because it isn't really very clear cut. Some people talked about "evil soft forks" to try to get rid of the simplistic notion: "soft forks are much better and hard forks are much worse" which tends to persist (naturally). The problem is that whether a fork is contentious or not is *much more important* than whether it fits the "soft" or "hard" technical definition.

When a fork isn't contentious, then the soft vs hard distinction (restricting the ruleset or relaxing it) really matters a lot, because "passive" network participants (imagine a piece of hardware that will never get updated to a new bitcoin version, in the extreme) will be fine with the first and not with the second.

When a fork *is* contentious, and miners, following economic incentive, end up choosing different rulesets to support different bitcoin users, then the chain genuinely forks into two histories. The fact that one ruleset is more restrictive than the other is part of the story but doesn't change the fundamental point that we have a chain split. This of course did actually happen meaningfully with bitcoin-cash in 2017. The term "evil soft fork" was some people trying to shake others of the misconception that if a fork is "soft" it's not coercive and not forcing action on anyone; that's definitely not true *if the fork is contentious*.

#bitcoin

Thank you for your perspective!

Was thinking about Luke‘s pov.

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Discussion

The paragraph "Softforks don't chain split.." might seem like it's disagreeing with what I'm saying, but it's not. It's expressing the same mechanics with a different emphasis. I don't disagree with that.

His "bcash is an altcoin with an airdrop" - that was his line iirc at the time, and I always thought that was unhelpful (and also rather typical of his dismissal of the reality of any conflict with his position). The point is that bcash *becomes* an altcoin or an airdrop after it becomes clear that it has fully failed to gain general economic consensus as "the" bitcoin. It isn't that *by definition*, before the market has decided.

His last paragraph is wrong and BIP444 is a disastrously bad idea imo. I strongly suspect it will not get anywhere. (Note that this does *not* mean I believe an attempt to soft fork a simple restriction on OP_RETURN would be a guaranteed fail, but BIP444 is not that).

I don’t get the thing with counter forking the softfork. What would that look like in case of segwit?

Softfork tightens the consensus rules, I suppose bip44 limits the opreturn.

To enforce that miners must agree to run a node that will enforce the new rules, and the majority of blocks need to signal that right?

How will he code the consensus rules change? He can't change core so he has to do it on knots, miners don't run knots or do they?