A History Of Bitcoin Hard Forks
A lively conversation and response to Jameson Lopp’s recent article that researches the answer to the question, “Has Bitcoin Ever Hard Forked?”Listen To The Episode Here:AppleSpotifyGoogleLibsynOvercastIn this episode of “Bitcoin, Explained,” hosts Aaron van Wirdum and Sjors Provoost discuss a recent blog post by Jameson Lopp titled, “Has Bitcoin Ever Hard Forked?”Hard forks are generally defined as Bitcoin protocol upgrades that remove or loosen rules, making these types of upgrades backwards-incompatible. Van Wirdum and Provoost explain, however, that in his blog post, Lopp argues that....
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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....
Bitcoin Core, an “open source software project that is a direct descendant of the original Bitcoin implementation”, released a statement late last week on its website. The main focus was how Bitcoin consensus rules were changed, which is typically through soft forks and hard forks. Hard forks and soft forks do virtually the same thing, so Bitcoin Core argues that soft forks are to be preferred as they do not cause the amount of harm on the Bitcoin network as a hard fork can potentially do since users can choose to upgrade to new features when they want to, or remain or the current Bitcoin....
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has summarized the implications of soft and hard forks amid growing tensions surrounding Bitcoin’s future. “...There is an essential difference between hard forks and soft forks: hard forks are opt-in, whereas soft forks allow users no “opting” at all,” he wrote earlier this week. The Bitcoin price was under downward pressure Friday as the community awaits Chinese regulatory announcements and indecisiveness over SegWit and Bitcoin Unlimited continues. After Unlimited succumbed to a bug earlier in the week, rhetoric between the opposing sides became even....
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....
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....