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by mike_hearn 3812 days ago
It's actually not true that there's never been a hard fork. I know the Core FAQ says that, but it's incorrect. When we moved past Berkeley DB to LevelDB, there was an accidental hard fork that revealed limits in older nodes nobody knew about. But those limits had to go, and so the change was attempted again in a more controlled manner some time later. So it was known that the network would start producing blocks that older nodes would reject. That's a hard fork. It was scheduled in advance and went off smoothly.

The idea that hard forks are dangerous or irresponsible is a belief that is not well supported. However it's a rather good piece of Bitcoin Core propaganda to scare people away from doing what's necessary.
3 comments
kanzure 3812 days ago
> The idea that hard forks are dangerous or irresponsible is a belief that is not well supported

bip99 - https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0099.mediawi...

https://www.reddit.com/r/bitcoinxt/comments/3t21dh/dangerous...

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3griiv/on_consensu...

> scare people away from doing what's necessary

Most block size hard-forks can be deployed as a soft-fork. "It's necessary" is highly contentious and you have failed to cite any of the arguments you disagree with- you're wasting everyone's time.

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wraithm112 3812 days ago
I said "intentional hard-fork" for a reason. For everybody's reference, the bdb to leveldb hard-fork happened in early 2013. Everybody acted swiftly to correct the issue by downgrading to 0.7 if I recall correctly.

An accidental hard-fork is a completely different animal from an intentional contentious hard-fork where half of the network goes one way and the other half the other way for the foreseeable future.

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mike_hearn 3810 days ago
So did I. Please re-read my post. The same change that triggered the accidental fork was done smoothly later on, but the change was the same - it was a deliberate hard fork. You probably didn't notice because there was plenty of lead time and I don't think any miners got split off the chain, even though they could have.
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sail 3812 days ago
Mike, can you imagine any way to run a cryptocurrency so that growth doesn't threaten decentralization?

Could a cryptocurrency not be controlled by those who can afford to spend the most in CPU power (like governments)?

Could consensus occur by human power?

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