Fusing Big Data, Blockchain and Cryptocurrency by Hossein Hassani & Xu Huang & Emmanuel Sirimal Silva

Author:Hossein Hassani & Xu Huang & Emmanuel Sirimal Silva
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030313913
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

3.1.3.2 Soft Fork

A soft fork in Cryptocurrency means the existing nodes also recognize the backward compatible change or update (Khatwani 2018), although the new nodes and existing nodes can somehow “co-exist”, the change will need the participators to autonomously upgrade accordingly and the change will only be enforced once a specific majority amount of miners participate. The famous example of Bitcoin is Segregated Witness (SegWit) . Proposed in 2015, it ensures the block size and block time remain the same, but separates the witness signatures from transaction to make the average transaction size smaller and improves transaction processing performance. Note that more details of the proposal can be found in GitHub (2015). Although this was stated as the solution to Bitcoin’s block limit, not all participators have agreed or carried out upgrades for their transactions. According to Torpey (2018), the number of Bitcoin transactions that implemented SegWit reached 30% in February 2018. To this end, the closest attempt for reinforcing a solution for the Bitcoin scalability issue is the New York Agreement (SegWit2X) that was scheduled to be achieved in August 2017, which was then cancelled due to a lack of consensus among stakeholders (Hertig 2017). Over these years, despite the deteriorating performance of the network in terms of coping with scalability and the efforts of many developers in promoting the upgrading of Bitcoin, there is still no consentaneous advancement that can be acknowledged by all.

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