Interview with Bitcoin Developer Peter Todd
GK: What potential risks could a soft fork pose if this were to be implemented using one?
PT: The feature itself may have a bug in it. However it’s implemented in about five lines of easy to review code, so that’s a relatively small risk. The bigger risk is to miners: during and after the upgrade it’s possible that non-upgraded miners could create invalid blocks accidentally, losing the funds associated with those blocks. However Bitcoin Core includes protections against this – partly written by myself – that mostly ensure old miners are forward compatible with new miners by ensuring they’ll never mine blocks containing transactions with opcodes reserved for upgrades.
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