Soft fork means, that clients <v0.6 won’t be on another chain after the fork. v0.6 clients and the older ones will stay on the same chain.
The fork can not occur before Tue 12 Dec 03:40:00 UTC 2017. That’s hard coded into the client.
After this date, 90% of the last 1000 proof-of-stake blocks need to be “version 2”, meaning they need to come from a v0.6 client, in order to activate the soft fork.
It also means that clients <v0.6 that are mining or minting after the fork will get their blocks orphaned.
Please tell me if I missed anything and I will gladly update this main post.
I was hoping that the v0.5 nodes would still be OK and that there was no urgency to upgrade. It appears that the Android wallet is stuck on 337836. I’m super busy but I will look into resolving this problem soon, including getting the abe explorer to work again.
Hope there is a technical summary shared with the community. The checkpoints are still “training wheels” that has caused hiccups in the past and also is an attack point by competing technologies, despite the introduction of optional checkpoints in v06.
Checkpoints were a necessity in the early days when network was open to attack by Bitcoin miners, to allow for defense against maleficent actors.
Ever since they were only used to help hardfork a network or warn about imminent upgrade. Starting from v0.6 we have adopted a consensus driver approach to forks (thresholds and all that fuzz).
What happened today was merely mis-configured checkpoint message which resulted in 0.5 nodes thinking that it’s time to roll over and seek cover in face of imminent danger. That is, message priority level was issued as critical.
Now, it’s simply reduced to notification level and all is fine.
