Re: What is a Bitcoin soft fork? (in laymen's terms)

Quote from: colinistheman on February 05, 2015, 05:27:04 AM

Quote from: jl2012 on February 05, 2015, 04:25:23 AM

Some comparisons:

Hardfork is making some invalid transactions valid

Softfork is making some valid transactions invalid

Hardfork requires the consensus of vast majority of miners, users, and merchants

Softfork requires the consensus of vast majority of miners, but not necessarily non-mining users and merchants

Hardfork can change any rules in the protocol or implement any new rules

Softfork is usually less powerful (with a trick which I call "Aux block", a softfork could also be very powerful: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=283746.0)

Thank you for the comparison! This was very helpful.

Are a hard fork and soft fork implemented in different ways? Like are you editing the same code in both fork types?

Every change requires editing the code. What you change to the code will determine whether the new version will force a soft fork, a hard fork or no fork at all.

You could edit the maximum allowed block size in the code. Change it to 100 KB and it'll be a soft fork, change it to 100 MB and it'll be a hard fork.