[Bitcoin-segwit2x] August Status Report for SegWit2x

[Peter Todd]

On Thu, Aug 24, 2017 at 07:31:34PM +0200, Gianluigi Crimi wrote:
> The main problem in that statement is not if EDA was triggered or not.
> The problem is that it is not and cannot be a soft-fork.
> With soft-forks you can increase the difficulty but you cannot decrease it.
> If you increase the difficulty with new rules there will not be backward
> compatibility issues, but if the difficulty decreases old clients will mark
> blocks mined with low POW as invalid.

That's a good point too - using the term "soft-fork" isn't correct. What I
should have said is simply that that BCH's header chain is compatible with BTC,
until the emergency difficulty adjustment activates. I definitely replied there
too quickly. :)

Of course, that's still a potential problem, albeit one averted by the EDA: in
different circumstances where the EDA had not activated, I was correct in
saying that we'd still have a problem for lite clients. Given that the EDA
definitely required lite clients to upgrade anyway it would have been better if
BCH had also made their block header *always* incompatible with BTC. Making the
nVersion incompatible would have been a simple and effective way to do that.

-- 
https://petertodd.org 'peter'[:-1]@petertodd.org
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