None of these required a hard fork.  I should rephrase my previous email to clarify the intended topic as hard consensus changes, requiring a hard fork.  "Soft" forks can be useful.

Raystonn

---

From: Jorge Timón <jtimon@jtimon.cc>
Sent: Saturday, May 22, 2021 7:55 AM
To: Raystonn . <raystonn@hotmail.com>; Bitcoin Protocol Discussion <bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org>
Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] Consensus protocol immutability is a feature

 

That is clearly not true. People entretain making changes to the protocol all the time. Bitcoin is far from perfect and not improving it would be stupid in my opinion.

Some improvements require changes to the consensus rules.

Recent changes include relative lock time verify or segwit. These are important changes that made things like lightning much easier and efficient than they could possibly be without them.

Taproot, which is a recent proposal, could help simplify the lightning protocol even further, and make it more efficient and its usage more private. And there are more use cases.

There have been consensus rule changes since bitcoin started, and with good reason. As a user, you can always oppose new changes. And if enough users agree with you, you will be able to maintain your own chain with the old rules. At the same time, there's nothing you can do to stop other users who want those changes from coordinating with each other to adopt them.

Perhaps you're interested in bip99, which discusses consensus rule changes in more detail.

On Sat, May 22, 2021, 13:09 Raystonn . via bitcoin-dev <bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org> wrote:

Suggestions to make changes to Bitcoin's consensus protocol will only ever be entertained if Bitcoin is completely dead without such a change.  Any attempt to change consensus protocol without a clear and convincing demonstration to the entire network of participants that Bitcoin will die without that change is a waste of your own time.  Bitcoin's resistance to consensus changes is a feature that makes it resistant to being coopted and corrupted.  I recommend developers focus on making improvements that do not attempt to change the consensus protocol.  Otherwise, you are simply working on an altcoin, which is off-topic here.

Raystonn

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