As a soft fork, older software will continue to operate without modification. Non-upgraded nodes, however, will not see nor validate the witness data and will consider all witness programs as anyone-can-spend scripts (except a few edge cases in version 0 witness programs which are provably unspendable with original script semantics). Wallets should always be wary of anyone-can-spend scripts and treat them with suspicion. Non-upgraded nodes are strongly encouraged to upgrade in order to take advantage of the new features.
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