If you have been paying close attention to Bitcoin recently, you may have noticed that the topic of "forking" is very popular.
Unlike the blockchain, a fork is a technical event that occurs when different participants determine common rules.
Fundamentally speaking, a fork is the splitting of the blockchain into two paths, either about the transaction history of the network or the new rules that make the transaction established.
Therefore, those who use the blockchain must choose one of the two.
However, there are many types of forks, and the scientific research on forks is very new. We currently know that some forks can be resolved on their own, but other forks caused by extreme community differences will permanently split the network, resulting in two blockchain histories and two independent currencies.
Therefore, the understanding of fork types, activation reasons and potential risks is not clear.
To illustrate, we briefly summarized the operating principles of different forks.
Basic knowledgeBefore starting the classification, it is necessary to know that the Bitcoin fork has started in an orderly manner.
Forking is a by-product of distributed consensus. As long as two miners discover a block almost simultaneously, a fork will occur. When subsequent blocks are added to one of the blocks, this uncertainty will disappear; to make this chain the longest, the other block is "isolated" or "abandoned" by the network.
When developers want to modify the software rules that determine whether a transaction is established, they can also fork the network voluntarily.
When a block contains invalid transactions, the block will be ignored by the network, and the miner who finds the block will lose the block reward. Therefore, usually miners only want to dig a valid block and join the longest chain.
The following are some common forks and features.
Hard forkA hard fork is a software upgrade that introduces new rules that are not compatible with old software into the network. You can think of it as an extension of the rule (the new rule to make the block size 2MB instead of 1MB will require a hard fork).
After the fork, nodes that continue to run the old version of the software will find that the new transaction is invalid. Therefore, in order to switch to the new chain to continue mining valid blocks, all network nodes must be upgraded to the new rules.
When there is a political deadlock and some people in the community stick to the old rules, problems will arise. The hash rate and network computing power of the old chain will become outdated. The important thing is that the data and rules of the old chain are still regarded as valuable. Of course, miners want to continue mining, and developers also want to continue to support it.
The DAO hard fork is the best analysis case to show the divergence of community rules. Now we have two different software blockchains-ETC and ETH, each with different concepts and currencies.
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