Hardforks and Softforks | What's the difference? College Crypto Vol. 5

Noah Ramos W.P. Carey School of Business, Studying Economics

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Hardforks and Softforks | What's the difference? College Crypto Vol. 5

Intro to Forks In A Blockchain

According to Mastering Bitcoin, PROGRAMMING THE OPEN BLOCKCHAIN by Andreas M. Antonopoulos, a fork in a decentralized ledger filled with important data is mandatory as other copies may be inconsistent with the correct blocks. In order to prevent this from happening each node in the network try's to add to the chain of blocks with the longest proof-of-work consensus. This is important as each node can calculate the amount of work done in the chain and compare that amount with other nodes' chains to ensure convergence on a single network.

Bitcoin Network

• 10 minute block times ensure that forks do not occur too often where as in a shorter block time transactions get settled faster with the setback of more forks occurring.

Assembling and Selecting Chains of Blocks Pg. 241, Mastering Bitcoin Node Example:

Hard Fork

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According to Mastering Bitcoin on page 257, it states that a Hard Fork is when a change in consensus occurs and the network does not return back to a single chain. Two separate chains are running simultaneously on different sets of consensus rules. An example given is when a bug is found on an application and and update is offered but not required. Once miners verify the new consensus on the next block, any hash power running the old consensus rules will not be able to verify the new implementation and will continue to mine for the candidate block (Antonopoulos 258) of the previous parent block.

When an open source software has a fork, the innovators and developers have often will split into two sides, one supporting a new revised roadmap to that of the previous. It is important to know that a Software Fork has Superiority to a Hard Fork and is required for a hard fork too occur. An example of a Software Fork on Bitcoin is Bitcoin Classic, which originally tried to increase Blocksize from 1 megabyte too 2 megabyte's in order to double processing times of transactions per second. When this software fork proved not to be scalable and they had to shift their stance to allowing the user to choose their block size. Another cryptocurrency's that allow you to choose your block size is Bitcoin Unlimited. Both of these cryptocurrency software forks never hard forked with Bitcoin as of July 7th, 2018.

Soft Fork

It can be agreed that not all changes to the consensus will result in the inability for an older version to recognize and verify the blocks mined on the new implementation of the network. Found on page 261 of Mastering Bitcoin, a soft fork is described as " A forward-compatible change to the consensus rules that allows unupgraded clients to continue to operate in consensus with the new rules." and is not really a fork at all, just an update within the system.

Segregated Witness Bitcoin Soft Fork Explanation

 * Segregated Witness was a soft fork and architectural change on the Bitcoin network that "moves the unlocking script (witness) from inside the transaction to an external data structure" (Antonopoulos 261); or segregating the witness from the block transaction. In order to create and execute a soft fork, most of the miners must agree and actually enforce the new set of rules upon a signaling (BIP-34 and now BIP-9).
 * Note that any client can move in favor of a soft fork with no required upgrades.

BIP-34 was the first soft fork that changed the signaling and required that the input of the transactions contain the block height and a version of 2 or higher.

Summary

Hard Forks were introduced introduced and explained as a Software Fork such as a bug fix that split from the original chain, leaving all non-updated clients out of luck. Soft Forks, such as BIP-9, the current signaling and activation mechanism fixed organization issues in the block version of the BIP-66 Mechanism (Antonopoulos 264). Thank you for joining me, Noah Ramos, for Vol. 5 of College Crypto and if would like to see more content like this get better, please leave a comment and an upvote if you found this useful; please feel free to reach out to me via email, Instagram, or the College Crypto Facebook group in the link below!

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