A soft fork is a change to the blockchain protocol that causes a change in the state of a transaction or block. This means that previously valid blocks or transactions become invalid.
A fork is a change to a blockchain protocol that causes a divergence or fork from the previous version. There are two types of forks that are common, namely hard forks and soft forks.
In this article, we will discuss more about soft forks, what they are, how they work, and examples.
Understanding Soft Forks
A soft fork is a change to a blockchain protocol that causes only previously valid blocks or transactions to become invalid. With a soft fork, the changes made are backward-compatible.
This means that old nodes can still add new blocks to the blockchain, as long as they comply with the new rules. Soft forks do not require all nodes to upgrade and agree to the new version, but only the majority of nodes.
Soft forks can occur due to software updates aimed at improving blockchain performance, security or features. Soft forks can also occur due to incompatibilities between nodes using different software versions.
A soft fork does not result in two different blockchain chains, but only one chain that follows new rules.
How Soft Fork Works
Soft forks can be illustrated with the analogy of a restaurant. For example, the restaurant has a rule that customers can only order food from the available menu.
Then, the restaurant decided to change the rules to be stricter, namely that customers could only order food from the green menu.
So, customers who already know the new rules will order food from the green menu, while customers who don't know the new rules can still order food from other menus, as long as it is still on the menu.
In this case, the restaurant is the blockchain, the customers are the nodes, and the menu is the blocks. Nodes that have upgraded the software will follow the new rules, namely only accepting blocks that are valid according to the new rules.
Nodes that have not upgraded their software can still receive blocks that are valid according to the old rules, as long as those blocks are also valid according to the new rules. So, no block is rejected by all nodes, but only by some nodes.
A soft fork requires a majority of nodes to follow the new rules, so that blocks are mined according to the new rules. If the majority of nodes do not follow the new rules, a hard fork will occur, namely a change that causes blocks or transactions that were previously invalid to become valid.
A hard fork will cause two different blockchain chains to exist, which cannot interact with each other.
Examples of Soft Forks
Soft forks have been used in several popular blockchains, such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, to implement new functions that are backward-compatible. The following are some examples of soft forks that have occurred:
BIP 66
Soft fork carried out in 2015 to improve signature validation on Bitcoin. This soft fork tightens the rules for signatures, so that only signatures that comply with the DER (Distinguished Encoding Rules) standard are accepted.
This soft fork aims to avoid malicious transaction attacks, namely attacks that manipulate signatures to change the identity of transactions.
SegWit
This protocol was carried out in 2017. This soft fork was carried out to increase Bitcoin's scalability and efficiency.
This soft fork separates signatures from transactions, thereby reducing transaction sizes and increasing block capacity. This soft fork also allows the implementation of other features, such as the Lightning Network, which is a solution for fast and cheap transactions.
EIP 150
This protocol was implemented in 2016. This is to increase Ethereum's security. This soft fork increases gas costs for some operations that are potentially vulnerable to DoS (Denial of Service) attacks, which are attacks that flood the network with excessive requests.
This soft fork is a response to the DoS attack that occurred on Ethereum after the DAO hard fork.
That's the article about soft forks (blockchain). Hopefully this article is useful and adds to your knowledge about blockchain technology. See you in the next article!
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