Hardfork

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A Hardfork is a change to the bitcoin protocol that requires all users upgrade.

Any alteration to bitcoin which increases the set of valid transactions is a hardfork. However, some of these changes can be implemented by having the new transaction appear to older clients as a pay-to-anybody transaction (of a special form), and getting the miners to agree to reject blocks including the pay-to-anybody transaction unless the transaction validates under the new rules. This is how P2SH was added to Bitcoin.

See also: Softfork