this post was submitted on 01 May 2025
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Good point, with BIPs the Bitcoin community is more adaptive than I gave it credit for.
It still doesn't prevent soft nor hard fork. My understanding is that a change in Bitcoin's consensus logic require ALL users/miners to take action to deploy the new software to avoid hard forks. That's impossible in practice. So a BIP to change the consensus logic, either tweaking or replacing PoW, would necessary cause a hard fork even if it's approved.
Not all chains handle this the same way nor suffer from this. For instance, using Tezos means automatically accepting algorithm changes after they are approved. This makes hard forks much less likely.
Bitcoin sure have more hype and higher price, but appears to have more difficulty evolving compared to others.
Tezos would still require all nodes to upgrade to the code which contains the new algorithm. It can’t just automatically know what the new code is. It then can schedule these to activate at a certain block using a signaling system of some sort. If some nodes didn’t upgrade, this would cause a hard fork if the version they are running doesn’t have the new version required to run the new algorithm
Its behavior and process as outlined in the link you sent is no different from other chains.
Bitcoin uses version bits to perform these types of upgrades (see bip 9 implemented in 2016)
Ethereum uses something similar. Solana’s activation mechanism is called “feature gate activation”.