I’m curious as to how the segwit update managed to propagate slowly and avoid being a hard hork without securing 50% of the hashing power.
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I did some searching, and found a link answering your question. I’ve quoted the main part of the answer below:
Witnesses are only included when the requester asks for them, which old clients don’t do. For them, new clients remove the witnesses before relay. Exactly because the witness of a transaction does not contribute to its txid, it is in fact possible to remove them before relay, without invalidating them. That is what makes it a soft fork.
https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/52152/how-is-segwit-a-soft-fork
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@Mr.Shill Glad you brought this up as I didn’t consider that the majority rule factor in soft forks was missing from the Segwit update.
Feel free to correct me if I’m wrong about this clarification:
While only 14% (at least in 2018) were utilizing the Segwit update, nodes that didn’t update would still recognize Segwit blocks because they still fit the original transaction block size of 1MB. Furthermore, with only 14% of users updating (again, in 2018), you might say this is a partial soft fork. Had this been a hard fork, all nodes would have to update their copy of the blockchain to continue interacting with it. Therefore, this is classified as a soft fork.
Because if you don’t upgrade your node to Segwit, you still follow the normal bitcoin consensus rules. Only when the majority updated their nodes, the non updated cant mine anymore. (if they where a big mining pool or something) for normal users, they do not get all information about segwit transaction (signatures ect) , so they become basically a light client. But thet can still do normal legacy transactions.
Segwit made more rules that still are valid according to the old consensus rules, so their can’t be a hard fork. Only if many people disagree with the changes and perform a hardfork themselves
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