Soft-forks on Bitcoin
A traditional soft-fork activation plays out like this:
- someone makes a proposal
- if half-dozen respected Core developers like that, they implement it and talk about it
- everybody loves the idea
- they ship it in Bitcoin Core
- miners turn it onA traditional soft-fork activation plays out like this:
A traditional soft-fork failure plays out like this:
- someone makes a proposal
- if half-dozen respected Core developers do not care much about the idea, they don’t do anything
- people fight on Twitter about the merits of the idea forever
A sidechain activation within BIP-300 plays out like this:
- someone writes the sidechain software
- if a bunch of people are interested in that, they start playing with it in test mode
- if it is really good people launch a proposal to miners
- miners vote yes or no