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