A wild velvet fork appears! inclusive blockchain protocol changes in practice - (Short paper).
File(s)
Accepted version
Author(s)
Type
Conference Paper
Abstract
The loosely defined terms hard fork and soft fork have established themselves as descriptors of different classes of upgrade mechanisms for the underlying consensus rules of (proof-of-work) blockchains. Recently, a novel approach termed velvet fork, which expands upon the concept of a soft fork, was outlined in [22]. Specifically, velvet forks intend to avoid the possibility of disagreement by a change of rules through rendering modifications to the protocol backward compatible and inclusive to legacy blocks. We present an overview and definitions of these different upgrade mechanisms and outline their relationships. Hereby, we expose examples where velvet forks or similar constructions are already actively employed in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Furthermore, we expand upon the concept of velvet forks by proposing possible applications and discuss potentially arising security implications.
Editor(s)
Zohar, Aviv
Eyal, Ittay
Teague, Vanessa
Clark, Jeremy
Bracciali, Andrea
Pintore, Federico
Sala, Massimiliano
Date Issued
2019-02-10
Date Acceptance
2018-03-01
Citation
Financial Cryptography and Data Security, 2019, LNCS 10958, pp.31-42
ISBN
978-3-662-58819-2
Publisher
Springer
Start Page
31
End Page
42
Journal / Book Title
Financial Cryptography and Data Security
Volume
LNCS 10958
Copyright Statement
© 2019 International Financial Cryptography Association. The Version of Record is available online at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-58820-8_3
Identifier
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-58820-8
Source
FC 2018 International Workshops, BITCOIN, VOTING, and WTSC
Publication Status
Published
Start Date
2018-03-02
Coverage Spatial
Nieuwpoort, Curaçao
Date Publish Online
2019-02-10