Soft Fork, Soft-Forking Change
This definition comes from the technical glossary.
Definition
A softfork is a change to the bitcoin protocol wherein only previously valid blocks/transactions are made invalid. Since old nodes will recognise the new blocks as valid, a softfork is backward-compatible.
Synonyms
- Soft fork
Not To Be Confused With
-
Fork (a regular fork where all nodes follow the same consensus rules, so the fork is resolved once one chain has more proof of work than another)
-
Hard fork (a permanent divergence in the block chain caused by non-upgraded nodes not following new consensus rules)
-
Software fork (when one or more developers permanently develops a codebase separately from other developers)
-
Git fork (when one or more developers temporarily develops a codebase separately from other developers
Links
-
Soft fork — Developer Guide
-
Soft fork — Bitcoin Wiki
-
What is a soft fork? — Bitcoin StackExchange