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Topic: First consensus driven hardfork in crypto history? (Read 308 times)

legendary
Activity: 2982
Merit: 1102
If I remember correctly, all of the PoW-first/pure-PoS-later coins were launched with an implicit "will be hardforked later" warning on them. I don't believe all of them ended up implementing a hardfork (correct me if I'm wrong), but a lot of them did. If my facts are accurate, then Mintcoin and its clones implemented a hardfork that was generally accepted by their users and expected from the start. If you want a list, then I can only remember Mintcoin, Blackcoin and Zeitcoin at the moment. My information might not be 100% accurate though, so just use it as a starting point for your research.

I get what you're saying, but I don't think that really fits the criteria. Yes, miners implicitly agreed that the coin would fork, but there was just a block height set by the dev that it would happen on, and I think generally that code was included in the original release. There hasn't been, as far as I'm aware, a coin that began its life as PoW, then at some point a new version was released and it switched to PoS after X out the last Y blocks were mined on the new version.

Edit: I think the distinction here is that of a consensus/community approved hardfork and one that is consensus driven. That is, in the approved case the hardfork client is released and block height announced, users and exchanges switch over at the behest of developers, so if miners don't then they're left mining on a worthless chain. Of course, it's possible users and/or exchanges refuse to switch, in which case the fork would be denied, but this doesn't happen much afaik in crypto world. In the consensus driven case the changes are not implemented until a verifiable percentage of blocks have been mined and recorded on the blockchain with the new version number.
sr. member
Activity: 399
Merit: 257
If I remember correctly, all of the PoW-first/pure-PoS-later coins were launched with an implicit "will be hardforked later" warning on them. I don't believe all of them ended up implementing a hardfork (correct me if I'm wrong), but a lot of them did. If my facts are accurate, then Mintcoin and its clones implemented a hardfork that was generally accepted by their users and expected from the start. If you want a list, then I can only remember Mintcoin, Blackcoin and Zeitcoin at the moment. My information might not be 100% accurate though, so just use it as a starting point for your research.
legendary
Activity: 2982
Merit: 1102
Myriadcoin has released a new client, v0.11.3, that will implement certain changes (BIP65/66, algo swap, and consensus rule) when 750 of the last 1000 blocks have been mined using the latest version. See here for details:
https://www.reddit.com/r/myriadcoin/comments/4rgidn/myriad_01131/

My question is, will this be the first consensus driven hardfork in crypto history? Certainly Bitcoin has performed several soft forks this way, and Bitcoin classic attempted/is attempting to hard fork this way, but I'm guessing myriad is going to beat classic to the punch.

Alt coins hard fork all the time: Vertcoin or feathercoin to change algos, digibyte or auroracoin or verge to switch to myriad style multi algo PoW, and many others to tweak consensus rules or make other more drastic changes. But, as far as I know this is always done by dictate from the dev or dev team: a new version is released, hard fork block announced, exchanges are made aware, and everything switches over smoothly (usually).

The closest examples I can think of are when Doge hardforked to auxpow, where there was much discussion, many reddit threads (wow), but ultimately it was just implemented and released by rnicoll and other devs, and much more recently the upcoming ETH hardfork where a vote was held, but I hardly think you can call 3% participation rate a consensus driven change (many would probably argue 75% isn't consensus, but it is clearly better than 3%).

So, is anyone aware of consensus driven hard forks occurring in any coin? Just curious if I'm overlooking or forgetting something, or if this will (possibly) be a crypto first.
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