Andreas Antonopoulos: Bitcoin will never hard fork

The possibility of the Bitcoin network splitting into two incompatible currencies has worried many Bitcoin holders, but Andreas Antonopoulos, author of "Mastering Bitcoin," believes that this situation is "absolutely impossible." In his view, Bitcoin is inherently resistant to controversial hard forks.

While attending the 2017 Blockchain Africa Conference, Antonopoulos was asked about his thoughts on Bitcoin hard forks, most likely due to the growing support for Bitcoin Unlimited (BU) among miners.

Antonopoulos replied:

I don't think we'll ever see a Bitcoin fork. The community would strongly resist that because we're in a completely different situation than Ethereum and I don't think you'll ever see that. There might be attempts to fork, but any miners who attempt to do so will learn the hard way what an economic majority means.

Antonopoulos mentioned Ethereum because the cryptocurrency network experienced a controversial split last year. Some community members decided to support a hard fork to recover the funds lost due to the The DAO vulnerability. The current Ethereum network split into ETH and ETC, the latter of which is still using the blockchain that has not rolled back the transaction.

Antonopoulos went on to explain why Bitcoin cannot deploy such controversial improvements: Bitcoin is currently a means of storing value, and its market value has recently exceeded $20 billion. He also mentioned the main differences between Bitcoin and ETH at this stage, as well as the maturity of the two systems.

A “Second Chance” in the Early Stages of Cryptocurrency Development

When Antonopoulos was asked to further elaborate on his views on controversial hard forks in Bitcoin and Ethereum (The DAO hard fork), he responded that as the value of a network increases and more people come to rely on it, controversial improvements are difficult to deploy.

I think every cryptocurrency should have a 'second chance' in its first few years. Bitcoin got a second chance in 2010 when we mined 184 billion bitcoins in one block due to a bug and everyone said, 'Never mind, just roll back that block, it doesn't set a precedent.' It's OK to do that early on, Ethereum got a second chance when they rolled back The DAO, just make sure it doesn't happen again.

The Bitcoin bug Antonopoulos mentioned was an accident of unrealistic value. Since it was very early in Bitcoin’s development and had a negative impact on all users (except those who exploited it maliciously), fixing it was not controversial.

The DAO, mentioned above, was a flawed smart contract that led to Ethereum’s controversial hard fork last year. The issue was centered on disagreements between users, not protocol-level vulnerabilities. ETC users believed that the hard fork would go against Ethereum’s original intention of being an unstoppable, censorship-resistant application platform; this situation was more controversial than Bitcoin’s value overrun.

Bitcoin’s value preservation function

In Antonopoulos’ view, a split of the Bitcoin network is impossible because it would have a negative impact on the value proposition (preservation) of this digital asset.

The controversial hard fork that split into BTC, Bitcoin Classic, Bitcoin Classic Lite, etc. will have a devastating impact on the value of Bitcoin. Instinctively, many people will reject this behavior. In order to protect the value-preserving function of Bitcoin, we should not support such tricks.

Antonopoulos added that Bitcoin users are likely to pay higher and higher transaction fees because there is currently no answer to the scaling problem. He said:

Until we have an answer to the capacity problem, there is nothing we can do, because you can’t perform maintenance on a 777 while it’s still flying.

The essential difference between Bitcoin and ETH

Regarding the controversial hard fork, Antonopoulos ended with the fundamental differences between Bitcoin and ETH.

ETH needs to continue to iterate quickly to reach a certain level of maturity and ensure that smart contracts can achieve specific goals. This means that errors of all sizes are inevitable, but Bitcoin cannot develop in this way.