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I plan to analyze soft forks to satisfy my own curiosity: how often do they occur, are they increasing in frequency, etc. Where can I find a record of blockchain soft forks? I'd love to find a handy webpage with the data, though I am running a full node if someone can walk me through generating the data.

Thanks in advance! Bruce

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Bitcoin Core maintains a document with all BIPs that are implemented, including those which establish a soft-forking consensus change. From that list, BIP16, BIP30, BIP34, BIP65, and BIP66 have been soft forking changes.

In the two first years of Bitcoin's history, changes were made more frequently, and much less care was taken that all consensus changes were backward compatible. Most of them probably were, though.

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  • Thank you for the prompt reply, Pieter. I am afraid I asked the wrong question. I am interested in "garden variety" forks that occur when two different mining nodes both produce a new block at the tip of the blockchain, before they are aware of each other's block. Where might I find a record of these "standard operating procedure" forks?
    – Pressed250
    Mar 30 '16 at 0:50
  • Ah, those are not usually called soft forks, but forks, branches, or orphans. Sorry, terminology...
    – Pieter Wuille
    Mar 30 '16 at 8:16

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