Bitcoin’s Biggest Names Come Together Warning of ‘Contentious Hard-Forks’
Some of the biggest names in Bitcoin united in a written letter of consensus on Bitcoin’s future this week, signaling a desire to “chart an effective path” on block size reform while warning of “dangerous” hard-forks without “widespread consensus.” The year-long debate on how to expand Bitcoin’s transaction handling capacity has drawn in figures from....
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Amid a bull run in prices, 80% of Bitcoin’s mining power has officially come out in support of a hard-fork which could be standard for all users “around July 2017.” A round table group of signatories including several mining pools, as well as exchanges and Core developers, released a statement outlining a more concrete timeline following a physical....
Today Bitcoin.org published a blog post explaining the view on hard forks and their current policy. For the organization, Bitcoin.org, this topic is a very important one and raises a lot of issues. The organization believes that contentious hard forks are not doing any good for Bitcoin and takes a stand against the current Bitcoin hard fork policy. In fact, the organization considers that the dangers of contentious hard forks are potentially so significant that Bitcoin.org decided to adopt a new policy. They consider that these contentious hard forks will leave people who chose the losing....
Bitcoin developers are probing deeper into how best to execute a so-called hard fork, a contentious upgrading tool that's been at the heart of the nearly $16bn network's most divisive debate for years now. The issue is that to be used cleanly and without unintentional consequences, a hard fork requires all the digital currency's miners to move to a new blockchain, or version of its transaction history. One case study of what can otherwise happen came last summer, when ethereum inadvertently split into two networks after executing a hard fork some users disagreed with. That's not to say....
Not only Ethereum (ETH), the public blockchain based on smart contracts, has been under Distributed Denial of Service attacks lately. Ethereum Classic (ETC), a blockchain launched on the Ethereum code, has been under a similar attack. Some of the attacks were specific to ETH, while some affected both chains. The attacks made both networks barely usable. Ethereum hard-forked Monday. Ethereum Classic hard forks October 25. “There was only so much that could be done by fixing the clients without making backwards-incompatible changes,” Ethereum Classic project coordinator Arvicco Arvicco told....
Hard forks are a rather contentious issue in Bitcoin. The controversy surrounding hard forks can be seen most prominently in the context of Bitcoin XT 's implementation of BIP 101. While there have been successful Bitcoin hard forks in the past, the problem with hard forks of the Bitcoin blockchain is that they're, well, hard. Any change to the Bitcoin protocol that requires a hard fork essentially requires near-complete consensus to avoid a potential blockchain split. For example, there are many individuals in the Bitcoin development community who do not believe that BIP 101's use of a 75....