I define a buried deployment as a consensus rule change that affects validity of blocks that are buried by a sufficiently large number of blocks in the current valid most-work chain, but the current block (and all its parents) remain valid.
BIP 123 suggests that BIPs in the consensus layer should be assigned a label "soft fork" or "hard fork". However, I think the differentiation into soft fork or hard fork should not be made for BIPs that document buried deployments. In contrast to soft forks and hard forks, buried deployments do not require community and miner coordination for a safe deployment. For a chain fork to happen due to a buried deployment, a massive chain reorganization must be produced off of a block in the very past. In the extremely unlikely event of such a large chain reorganization, Bitcoin's general security assumptions would be violated regardless of the presence of a buried deployment. _______________________________________________ bitcoin-dev mailing list bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev
