Force Intelligence Agency | Fork turmoil, the inevitable path for every successful blockchain project

Force Intelligence Agency | Fork turmoil, the inevitable path for every successful blockchain project
This article was originally written by IPFS Force Zone

Recently, more and more media interviews about Filecoin have involved issues related to forks. The main reason is that the Filecoin economic model released by Protocol Labs has brought certain pressure to miners who participated in Filecoin mining in the early stage in terms of mining income, pre-staking/post-staking, and penalty mechanisms, causing dissatisfaction among some community members.

So, can forks perfectly solve all problems? Looking back at the past and looking at the present, perhaps the battle for Bitcoin’s expansion can give us some answers.

The Bitcoin Scaling Battle



As an open-source decentralized project, the public chain project is equivalent to being delivered to the community once the mainnet is launched. However, problems often arise during operation, and the entire system needs to be upgraded. However, the upgrade of the public chain is not as simple as the centralized software upgrade. There are many stakeholders involved, such as miners, mining pools, exchanges, token holders, etc.

This kind of upgrade may bring benefits to one party while damaging the interests of many other parties, so the upgrade process is often accompanied by fierce and lengthy debates. The most typical example is the Bitcoin expansion war - the core developer Bitcoin Core vs the miners.
 


In order to prevent dust attacks and lower the threshold for node mining, the Bitcoin block size was limited to 1MB at the beginning. As Bitcoin has gained widespread attention and use around the world, the 1MB block size has gradually been unable to meet the growing transaction needs. Soon, the Bitcoin network began to become congested, and users who initiated transfer transactions had to pay expensive fees in order to be packaged as soon as possible.
 
As the leader of the crypto asset market, Bitcoin has more than a thousand developers around the world contributing code to it. Soon, various improvement plans related to Bitcoin expansion were proposed, and it seemed that only one plan needed to be selected and implemented immediately.

But the reality is far from that simple because it involves forks.

Soft forks and hard forks



Forks are divided into "soft forks" and "hard forks". "Soft forks" have less impact, and miners only need to upgrade to the new version, but the technical difficulty is higher and the implementation plan is relatively complicated, such as Bitcoin's segregated witness;

A hard fork is simpler and more brutal . Miners need to switch to a new chain to mine . The technical difficulty is relatively low , such as directly changing the Bitcoin block size limit.

Let’s use an example that may not be so appropriate to make it easier to understand: a soft fork is when users upgrade their mobile phone operating system to improve performance in all aspects, and a hard fork is to simply change to a more favorite mobile phone.
 

In the blockchain field, the forks that cause heated discussions in the community are generally "hard forks", because once a hard fork occurs, the community and miners will face the choice of whether to continue with the original chain or switch to a new chain? The more successful the blockchain project is, the more stakeholders it has, and it is difficult to reach a consensus, which makes it very easy for the old and new chains to run at the same time. For example, BTC and BCH, ETH and ETC, BCH and BSV, etc.


What is the impact of Filecoin fork?



Whether it is Bitcoin, Ethereum or Filecoin, the code itself is open source, and any capable development team can "stand on the shoulders of giants" to innovate and optimize to develop a blockchain network that is more suitable for commercial applications. Just as if there are multiple competitors in a certain industry, it is conducive to promoting the rapid development of this industry to a certain extent.


However, as the leading project in the field of distributed storage, Filecoin currently has the strongest community consensus, and it is difficult for other forked projects to surpass it in terms of ecological layout and market value.

 

 

The screenshot is from a document published on Github by a Filecoin fork project, which aims to make a series of adjustments to Filecoin's economic model through forks, thereby alleviating the pressure on miners to a certain extent and gaining more benefits. Its starting point is understandable, and some top miners have also revealed their thoughts in this regard in media interviews. It is foreseeable that many fork projects will appear after the launch of the Filecoin mainnet.

 

But no matter what, we still have to resist those forks that are purely for profit . If some concepts are fabricated just to make money and do not bring substantial contributions to the distributed storage industry, then the fork will be a harm to the promotion of Filecoin and the entire distributed storage industry.


/End.

Statement: This article is an original article from IPFS Force District. The copyright belongs to IPFS Force District. It may not be reproduced without authorization. Violators will be held accountable according to law.

Tip: Investment is risky, so be cautious when entering the market. This article is not intended as investment and financial advice.



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