100 sats \ 3 replies \ @Wil 26 Sep 2022 \ on: Two Key System bitcoin
Is it possible for Bitcoin to softfork an upgrade to sha-256 or are we stuck with it forever?
Not sure why you asked this question here versus starting a new thread/discussion, but as a quick answer:
There are a lot of things which we could probably accomplish via a soft-fork, and some such soft-forks might even utilize some lesser-known "bugs" in the protocol to achieve their design goals. For example, the off-by-one bug in how difficulty is calculated actually can be used to enforce some protocol upgrades.
That being said, designing a soft-fork to replace sha256 with a different algorithm as the primary representation of PoW in the protocol would be very difficult to accomplish (not to mention very controversial within the community and unlikely to achieve consensus anytime soon).
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Thanks for the answer! Ya definitely not the right spot for the question. Seems like upgrading sha should be something ppl would be open to considering sha1 had an NSA backdoor if I'm not mistaken.
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The bitcoin community is extremely resistant to change, and for good reason. But I have faith that if a fatal bug was discovered and the entire project was threatened, the nodes and miners would come to consensus quickly and fix the issue. At a certain point, the principle of immutability has to be dropped in favor of keeping the system alive. But that's just my two cents.
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