None of these required a hard fork.  I should rephrase my previous email to 
clarify the intended topic as hard consensus changes, requiring a hard fork.  
"Soft" forks can be useful.

Raystonn

________________________________
From: Jorge Timón <[email protected]>
Sent: Saturday, May 22, 2021 7:55 AM
To: Raystonn . <[email protected]>; Bitcoin Protocol Discussion 
<[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] Consensus protocol immutability is a feature

That is clearly not true. People entretain making changes to the protocol all 
the time. Bitcoin is far from perfect and not improving it would be stupid in 
my opinion.
Some improvements require changes to the consensus rules.
Recent changes include relative lock time verify or segwit. These are important 
changes that made things like lightning much easier and efficient than they 
could possibly be without them.
Taproot, which is a recent proposal, could help simplify the lightning protocol 
even further, and make it more efficient and its usage more private. And there 
are more use cases.

There have been consensus rule changes since bitcoin started, and with good 
reason. As a user, you can always oppose new changes. And if enough users agree 
with you, you will be able to maintain your own chain with the old rules. At 
the same time, there's nothing you can do to stop other users who want those 
changes from coordinating with each other to adopt them.

Perhaps you're interested in bip99, which discusses consensus rule changes in 
more detail.



On Sat, May 22, 2021, 13:09 Raystonn . via bitcoin-dev 
<[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>>
 wrote:
Suggestions to make changes to Bitcoin's consensus protocol will only ever be 
entertained if Bitcoin is completely dead without such a change.  Any attempt 
to change consensus protocol without a clear and convincing demonstration to 
the entire network of participants that Bitcoin will die without that change is 
a waste of your own time.  Bitcoin's resistance to consensus changes is a 
feature that makes it resistant to being coopted and corrupted.  I recommend 
developers focus on making improvements that do not attempt to change the 
consensus protocol.  Otherwise, you are simply working on an altcoin, which is 
off-topic here.

Raystonn

_______________________________________________
bitcoin-dev mailing list
[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>
https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev
_______________________________________________
bitcoin-dev mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev

Reply via email to