History & Governance • Estimated 30m

Accidental Confiscation

protocol.accidental-confiscation

Accidental confiscation is the risk that a poorly designed soft fork makes previously spendable coins effectively unspendable. It is most acute for reserved upgrade features, presigned transactions, and hidden committed scripts whose future constraints may change.

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Curated resources (4)

• Bitcoin Optech Topic: Accidental Confiscation (article) Canonical source for the risk model, including reserved upgrade features, presigned transactions, and committed scripts.
• Bitcoin Optech Topic: Soft Fork Activation (article) Broader activation context for why new consensus restrictions can create coordination and safety failures.
• Bitcoin Optech Topic: Consensus Cleanup Soft Fork (article) Concrete example of upgrade discussions where old feature usage and backward compatibility become spendability concerns.
• The Blocksize War (book) Long-form history of why activation design, backward compatibility, and consensus safety have social and economic consequences.

Direct prerequisites (1)

• Soft Forks vs Hard Forks

Direct dependents (0)

• None

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