> In some ways, however, to me at > least - Bitcoin is like Windows 3.11. [...] > Now there is a huge debate about if there > should ever be a Windows 95, XP, Pro, etc., that scales better and makes > advances over time, but doesn’t support facets of older versions as it gets > updated.
I like your analogy for how it frames blockchain compatibility in terms of the backward compatibility that hopefully most computer-literate people already understand, but there's a key ingredient missing. It's as if, if everyone in the world did somehow upgrade to Windows 95, it would become forever impossible to take a program written *on* Windows 95 but *for* Windows 3.11, and successfully run it on a Windows 3.11 computer. It would be as if cross-compilers from Windows 95 to Windows 3.11 didn't, and couldn't, exist. Any coins that have post-hardfork coinbase outputs anywhere in their tree of inputs (a Windows 3.11 program, that's written on a computer that has ever run a Windows 95 program) can never be spent on the no-change side of the fork. _______________________________________________ bitcoin-dev mailing list [email protected] https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev
