Why is a hard fork such a bad thing?
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I understand that there are risks with every hard fork, but why is hard forking seen as some sign of weakness in the crypto scene. Being able to adapt whilst technology is young and in an incubation phase before the network gets too large is surely is a strength? Evolution and adaptation to to the changing environment is the reason I’m sat behind this keyboard typing this message. Isn’t sticking to your guns and avoiding hard forks just like crypto dogma?
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Could you imagine if your bank all sent out every customer that after a certain date a few weeks away you need to get yourself new credit cards, and if you don’t and you try to pay someone, they won’t get your money but it would be gone from your account for good?
I see a hard fork a bit like that as everyone that uses that coin needs to upgrade their wallet or they won’t be able to spend the your coins and every time there is a hard fork on a coin I always see someone posts that they broke their wallet and they didn’t have a back up etc.
You almost always end up upsetting a small few and if the hard fork isn’t done well you could seriously damage the reputation of your coin.
But you are correct, better to upset a small minority that risk having a majority walk away from it.
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Ahh good points, I tend to think of this as software, not as a currency replacement. Could this be prevented at client level?
Litecoin (warren) posted reasons why there are against Hard Forks.
Arbitrary Hardforks Hardly Inspires Confidence
Bitcoin and Litecoin are exceedingly careful in avoiding unnecessary rule changes that completely breaks sync compatibility with old clients. Prior to the official release of Litecoin 0.8.x we carefully reviewed the code multiple times and even hired an external expert to quadruple check our work to reduce the likelihood of accidents.Bitcoin has many users still using very old versions. The Litecoin network is less afraid of using alerts and other discouragement to coax users onto newer versions, yet there still persist many old clients that are at risk of accidental hardfork from the BIP50 BDB lock limit issue. Old clients are highly discouraged but they remain (somewhat) compatible because both networks have never forced any completely incompatible block-level protocol change upon users.
Contrast this to various amateur clones of Bitcoin. They are characterized by a rush to market with code that was not well designed or tested, often containing errors that require mandatory hardforks to correct. Sometimes hastily written “fixes†have introduced additional problems often resulting in further mandatory upgrades. Often on their forums, weeks after a hardfork you see confused users who are on an old chain.
Stability of the protocol matters a great deal to the perceived viability of a network as a long-lasting medium of commerce. Litecoin has been strong because of doing things in the Bitcoin way, just with different hardware protecting its network. If Litecoin were to fundamentally change the rules for reasons unrelated to technical correctness and in a way that requires everyone to suddenly change their software it would make people question the stability of the network and the professionalism of its developers.
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Stability is a great thing, but Stability for the sake of stability also stifles innovation.
The trick is to find the correct balance between the two
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Stability is a great thing, but Stability for the sake of stability also stifles innovation.
The trick is to find the correct balance between the two
I think this is fair. Ideally, the best plan would be to get as much of this out of the way when you are ‘small/young’.
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No I think what is needed is a more simple possibly automatic update process. In theory this could also be decentralised and built into the wallet itself. The version you have will expire in x days click here to install updates. Then if the update process was well tested it could block an old version from opening or sending coins until the wallet was updated. Just a thought. :)
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That’s why we need to give longer warning times, if / when there is a hard fork, and “spam” all interested parties, exchanges, miners and pools especially need to update. If they have a lot of traffic they can cause forks of the block chain.
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Hard forks are big problems for people that don’t follow it…every…single…day. If you go on vacation for a few weeks, or just get busy IRL during the holidays, you can come back totally wiped out because “the fork was announced 5 days ago = you missed it” isn’t going to make that person want to get back into dealing with that coin again.
