Topic: Why do people find it hard to understand hard fork? (Read 172 times)

The Concept of Blockchain is quiet complex to understand and would take some while to wrap your head around it. Even after you start learning blockchain concepts like mining and hard fork might seem complicated for people to understand so in this post i will try to explain how hard fork works in simple words.

There are two types of forks which are called as hard fork and Soft fork

Let's say john, Andrew and Alice are Grad students and would want to come up with their own blockchain startup to make sure all their marks cards are being put on the blockchain as they it is extremely important to guard their marks cards. They name the network as JAA Chain.

All the three decide on one rule and design the software(Set of Rules) such that if a person scores 60% then his marks card would be put on the blockchain and since the whole network is occupied by people who support these three all of them accept this rule and make this as a standard that has to be followed.

Now, It's been 3 months and the network is up and running but Alice feels that they have set the score too high and wants to reduce it to 55% and she also has a set of network accepting her claim but John and Andrew are against this idea of using 55% as the yardstick.

After a series of negotiations Alice just develops her own software(Set of rules) that validate a block ( To accept the block into the network) and asks her followers to download this software and use this to validate new blocks. This is called as hard fork. Here, She is completely changing the way a block is validated. She would name this JAAU Chain.( John Andrew Alice updated).

Now Another Issue is up for our original chain. There is a bug in the software that is consuming a lot of time to validate the block. John and Andrew will make this small change and informs the majority of the network about the change. Only the blocks with this issue are considered as invalid and the remaining(New) blocks would start following the new rules. This could be called as Soft fork.

Points to remember:

In Hardfork the entire network has to accept the change
In Soft fork only Majority of the nodes should accept the change as this is enough to consider the blocks as invalid

Why do they hard fork?
1. If the network is bugged about the scalability issues and how slow the network is they would consider forking the chain.
2. If there is a threat to security.

Do they all succeed?
Well, This remains one of the most controversial part in the blockchain community. Some of them like the idea of forking and some believe it's dangerous to fork the chain as it would decrease the price of the current chain. When a new chain is formed you would get the same amount of new coins as the old coins you own. Let's the example of JAA and JAAU chain. Imagine if you have 2 JAA Coins then after the split you would recieve 2 JAAU coins.

In terms of Bitcoin the fork has always been used to increase the speed of transactions. Some of them have succeeded and Most of them haven't but let's hope for the best!

Please Correct me if i've made any mistake and Add Anything if i have missed out