Bitcoin full nodes require increasing computer resources that are not available to most of the public, therefore most users tend to use SPV. Simplified Payment Verification is a way for users to check the validity of a block without downloading the whole blockchain, only needing a copy of the block headers of the longest chain.

This schema makes SPV clients vulnerable to forks as it is secure under the assumption that the longest chain is valid and as attacks like Segwit2x have shown and this is not always a safe assumption. A new schema has been proposed on the Bitcoin-dev mailing list that allows invalid blocks to be rejected as long as there are enough honest miners to create a block within a reasonable time frame. The new schema doesn’t fully protect clients against dishonest miners but is an improvement over the current SPV.