A Bitcoin Hard Fork? How the Science Behind Contentious Code Change is Advancing
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....
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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....
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....
A Cornell University professor of computer science who has proved to have a knack for pointing out flaws in blockchain code believes the hard fork that occurred earlier today is a sign of maturity for the ethereum platform. Last month, Cornell's Emin Gün Sirer emerged as a major critic of The DAO, the project whose failings ultimately led to the hard fork, pointing out vulnerabilities in its code and becoming the go-to source for ethereum coders looking to understand what exactly happened and how it could be avoided again. Though he’s still quick to point out that unforeseen....
“Segregated Witness [Segwit] is the most radical and irresponsible protocol upgrade Bitcoin has faced in its eight year history,” wrote the pseudonymous author Jaqen Hash’ghar for Medium. “The push for the [Segwit] soft fork puts Bitcoin miners in a difficult and unfair position to the extent that they are pressured into enforcing a complicated and....
Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin, set a hard cap of 21 million BTC, which means there will only ever be 21 million Bitcoin in existence. How could Bitcoin's hard cap be modified?Despite the above-mentioned opposing incentives, a supply cap change is potentially achievable. For example, several entities would have to work together to modify Bitcoin's supply cap.Developers would have to suggest the modification first, then write the code to implement it. There would be a communal debate, which would almost certainly be contentious. Developers would have to agree on these improvements....