Feb 25, 2022
In this episode of Bitcoin,
Explained, hosts Aaron van Wirdum and Sjors Provoost revisit
the Taproot activation saga, this time to discuss burying of soft
forks.
Taproot, the last soft fork to have been deployed on
the Bitcoin network, activated in late 2021. Now, Bitcoin Core
developers are considering to “bury” the soft fork, which means
that future Bitcoin Core releases will treat Taproot as if the rule
change has been active since Bitcoin’s very beginning. (With the
exception of one block mined in 2021 that breached the Taproot
rules which have since been added to the protocol.)
In the episode, Sjors explains what the benefits are
of burying a soft fork, in particular pointing out how it helps
developers when they review the Bitcoin Core codebase or when they
perform tests on it.
After that, Aaron and Sjors outline a potential edge
case scenario where burying soft forks could, in a worst-case
scenario, split the Bitcoin blockchain between upgraded and
non-upgraded nodes. Bitcoin Core developers generally don’t
consider this edge case — a very long block re-org — to be a
realistic problem and/or believe that this would be such a big
problem that a buried soft fork would be a minor concern
comparatively. However, they explain, not everyone agrees with this
assessment entirely…
Finally, Aaron and Sjors touch on issues like whether soft fork
activation logic should itself be considered a soft fork, and
whether soft fork burying logic should be considered a consensus
change and/or require a Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP).