Yes sir. I have no idea what you are on about aside from the taproot "upgrade". Just when I think I am finally getting a handle on the technicals on bitcoin, after a few years of glancing studies, you come out the this new shit. And I thought I understood bitcash. Johnarb, I do not like you.
Wait a minute...When johnarb joined the forum, it was BTC 1.0, yes? What version of john do we have now? hehe. Cylons!
lol, it's all good. Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer, decentralized, distributed network
So think of running Microsoft Word, but a network version p2p and decentralized
So let's say MS Word v1.0 is very basic, can type letters and numbers, but no special characters or special formatting like bold, italics and underline
Let's say version MS Word v2.0 came out and everyone on the network can do the special formatting and characters, but you choose to stay on v1.0, it's all good, when they get stuff from you, they'll say oh, that guy never sends special characters, but we'll accept his letters because he always has something good to say
That's basically what it is with Bitcoin. They come out with BIP (Bitcoin Improvement Proposals) that get activated on the network on the specified block when enough miners are running the newer Bitcoin software version
This is how we knew the Taproot was going to get activated months ago when the miners started running the newer version and became 90% (don't know what the required percentage was, just giving out an example)
This is the process with previous Bitcoin upgrades
If you choose to run an old version of Bitcoin, you can still send and receive bitcoins but cannot take advantage of newer features. See example of MS Word v1.0 and v2.0
For example, if you never used Segwit, that's cool, newer versions can still accept your bitcoins on old legacy addresses. Or maybe you don't ever need multisig, you can run a Bitcoin version that does not support it
Some hodlers have experimented with custom software of Bitcoin, in order to streamline the software, so the less stuff you have, the less possible attack vectors. Many bitcoins were lost years ago due to mistakes on these customized software, for example instead of sending the excess bitcoin to change addresses, the bitcoins became transaction fees. You can google them, if interested
Bitcoin is open source on Github, prior to the latest version 22.0, the version numbering was 0.21 and lower
https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/releases
