Topic: Todays TOP post in Chinese forum: Terminate the hard/soft fork debate - page 3. (Read 2158 times)

We all know that the biggest worry about a hard fork is that the minority hash power might extend and permanently split the chain

But what if a hard fork can prevent this from happening just like a soft fork? This is the latest post in chinese forum

"Terminate the hard/soft fork debate: A safe hard fork works the same as a soft fork" http://8btc.com/thread-40796-3-1.html

Put is shortly: A very smart Chinese engineer from the best science university in China analyzed the behavior of soft fork and concluded that the same behavior can be setup in a hard fork to achieve the same result, making sure that no chain split would ever happen

Let's look at an example: A new bitcoin version reduced the block size limit to 0.5M. This is a soft fork since it is a tightening of the rules. If majority of the miners are running the new version, then the old miners who produce 1M blocks will get nothing: All their mined blocks are rejected and orphaned by the miners running the new version. So their economy incentive will be quickly upgrade to the new version to avoid loss

If this new version increased the block size limit to 2M, that will be a hard fork, since it is a loosening of the rules. If majority of the miners are running the new version, then the minority miners who only accept 1M blocks would still working fine: All their mined blocks are accepted by the miners running newer version

The breakthrough is coming from here: In a safe hard fork, all the upgraded miners will reject those small blocks produced by the minority miners, and extend the chain with small blocks mined by them, thus orphaning those small blocks

As a result, non-upgraded nodes would incur huge loss and will immediately upgrade to the new version, quickly make the hash rate on the new version almost 100%

And for those full nodes running old version, they will not be affected as long as the new version still produce less than 1M blocks, so after a while when all the hash power are already on the new version, they could upgrade to enable the bigger blocks, since they don't command any hash power, their impact to the network would be minimum