Why Bitcoin’s Next Soft Fork Could Feel Like a Practice Run

Issues like quantum resistance may command attention, but a practical cleanup is what many experts think Bitcoin’s next soft fork is likely to address, spanning fixes for vulnerabilities in the network’s difficulty adjustment mechanism to denial-of-service vectors among miners. Proposed in 2019 and known as the Great Consensus Cleanup (BIP-54), the upgrade seeks to address the “cruft” in Bitcoin’s consensus design through changes that have historically been sidelined, as described by long-time Bitcoin developer and BIP-54 co-author Matt Corallo.