Topic: Hard forks and soft forks (Read 437 times)

This is what I meant, sorry if I didn't make that clear but it would be a stupid idea to make the regular core have a switch to change the blockchain (as, if you accidently click it, you'd have to go through a full resync of the blockchain and end up with almost double the previous data stored
The segwit address as I understand it is generated with a same private key as the regular bitcoin legacy address. The difference is the coins must be transferred to and sent from a SEGWIT address. It cannot come from a legacy address and have the pay-to-script features - so the segwit address must be loaded instead of the legacy address.

No. There is no backward compatible hard forks. That is pretty much a definition.
Bitcoin Cash was a hard fork, Segwit was a soft fork. People don't need to update to new clients to still accept Segwit blocks. People do need to update to a new client to use Bitcoin Cash as old Bitcoin clients will not accept the 8 mb blocks.
As I understand when you send to a segwit address an old node will see those funds to be spendable by anyone, since you don't need a signature in the input for the transaction to be valid. In segwit signatures are detached from the transactions. The point is that miners agreed with the segwit activation that they will not accept transactions that spend from segwit address without providing a signature that is outside the transaction.

So it's a hard fork but with backwards compatibility?
I read on the bitcoin site, not sure if this is useful, but segwit addresses are acceptable in older versions as well but there must be a confirmation from the segwit address to the legacy address before it will be added (basically, it doesn't accept the transactions in the network, just ones already in the blockchsin). Anything segwit comparable and onwards will still use it as if it were a legacy address though.

Hard fork does not require changes to previous transactions/blocks, nor does it require that legacy bitcoin addresses be invalidated.

A hard fork is a software change such that blocks that are valid in nodes running the new version of the software are invalid in nodes running the previous version of the software.

Since blocks that are valid in BCC are invalid in BTC, it is a hard fork.

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A soft fork is a software change such that the blocks that are valid in nodes running the new version of the software are still valid in nodes running the previous version of the software.

Since blocks that are valid in nodes that run SegWit are also still valid in older nodes that are not yet running SegWit, it is a soft fork.

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Because a hard fork is not backwards compatible to older versions of the software, a hard fork will isolate any node that is still running the old software.  Those older nodes will be incapable of synchronizing the hard-fork blockchain and will split off on to their own chain that does not include any of the blocks that use the new rules.

Because a soft fork is backwards compatible to older versions of the software, a soft fork will not isolate nodes that are still running the old software.  Those older nodes will be able to synchronize the soft-fork blockchain and will not split off on to their own chain as long as the majority of the mining hashpower supports the new rules.

Afaik it's a soft fork. There weren't any previous transactions/blocks edited and legacy bitcoin addresses can still be used in the new version. Although enlighten me if I'm wrong here.