Soft Fork, Soft-Forking Change
This definition comes from the technical glossary.
Definition
A temporary fork in the block chain which commonly occurs when miners using non-upgraded nodes violate a new consensus rule their nodes don’t know about.
Synonyms
- Soft fork
Not To Be Confused With
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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)
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Hard fork (a permanent divergence in the block chain caused by non-upgraded nodes not following new consensus rules)
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Software fork (when one or more developers permanently develops a codebase separately from other developers)
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Git fork (when one or more developers temporarily develops a codebase separately from other developers
Links
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Soft fork — Bitcoin Developer Guide
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Soft fork — Bitcoin Wiki
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What is a soft fork? — Bitcoin StackExchange