What is Soft Fork?

In terms of blockchain technology, a soft fork (or sometimes softfork) is a change to a software protocol where only previously valid blocks/transactions are made invalid. Since old nodes will recognize new blocks as valid, a soft fork is backwards compatible. This type of fork only requires the majority of miners to upgrade to enforce the new rules, as opposed to a hard fork that requires all nodes to upgrade and agree on a new version.

How does Soft Fork work?

New transaction types can often be added as soft forks, requiring only participants (e.g. senders and receivers) and miners understand the new transaction type. This is done by having the new transaction appear to old customers as a “pay anyone” transaction (in a special form) and get the miners to agree to reject blocks consisting of this transaction unless it is validated against the new rule. Here’s how to pay for hash codes (P2SH) that have been added to Bitcoin.

A soft fork can also happen sometimes due to a temporary divergence in the blockchain when miners using non-upgraded nodes violate the new consensus rule without their nodes knowing.

Soft forks do not require any nodes to upgrade to maintain consensus because all blocks with newly processed software also follow the old rules, hence old customers accept them. Soft forks are irreversible without a hard fork because by definition soft forks only allow the set of valid blocks to become an exact subset of the part before the valid fork.

If a user upgrades to the application after the soft fork and for some reason the majority of miners switch back to the pre-softfork client, the client user after the soft fork will break the consensus as a block does not follow their client’s new law. For a piece of software to work, most of the mining power needs to run a client that recognizes the fork. The more miners accept the new rules, the more secure the network is after it’s over. If you have 3/4 miners recognizing the fork, then 1/4 of the block generated is not guaranteed to follow the new rules. These 1/4 blocks will be valid for old nodes that don’t know the new rules, but they will be ignored by new nodes.

Soft forks have been used on the Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchains, among others, to implement new and upgraded functions that are backward compatible.

Nour

According to Tapchibitcoin

Follow the Twitter page | Subscribe to Telegram channel | Follow the Facebook page