Prepare for a rainy day and get ready for Bitcoin hard fork. All you need is a good reason

Although a Bitcoin hard fork is not imminent, Bitcoin developers have already begun researching the technical changes that would be required for a hard fork.

The developer activity speaks to the new responsibilities Bitcoin Core has taken on as the bitcoin protocol has grown from a private project of its secretive creators to a broad network of customers, businesses and stakeholders.

Bitcoin remains the most widely used blockchain platform (and one that many believe has the greatest potential to change the way society transacts), and its developers believe that the responsibility of hard forking Bitcoin should be taken seriously.

In this sense, there has been a renewed emphasis within Bitcoin Core to explore how to implement hard forks, a type of protocol change that has become a controversial lightning rod in bitcoin’s ongoing scaling debate. In other blockchain networks, hard forks have led to network splits.

Matt Corallo, a senior Bitcoin Core developer, said:

“No one has successfully hard forked a live network to date. A lot of people working at Core think we should study the idea of ​​hard forking.”

Regardless, Corallo said, it’s important to be prepared, but Ethereum’s failed hard fork further points out the problems with hard forks, which require more analysis.

Earlier this summer, after a high-profile Ethereum project, The DAO, was compromised by a code vulnerability, Ethereum enacted a code change plan, known as a hard fork. As a result, developers proposed a permanent blockchain split, with Ethereum split into two chains.

A hard fork means that every node — miners, merchants and users — must upgrade to validate new blocks, but some groups are reluctant to upgrade because of controversy over forks.

The result is the emergence of two development groups - Ethereum and Ethereum Classic - each claiming to be the vision for the 'Ethereum' project.

Given that a hard fork of Bitcoin could result in a situation similar to Ethereum, the Bitcoin developer community has deep reservations about whether a hard fork should be discussed.

Scaling Bitcoin

The tensions over the issue feed into a larger debate about how best to change the bitcoin protocol, but a hard fork isn’t the only solution being discussed.

For example, a 'soft fork' solution is backwards compatible and self-correcting, so most miners only need to update to the new consensus rules. Old nodes will then see the new blocks as valid.

In this case, there is no need for all users or nodes to update to accept the new consensus principles and continue to verify transactions. (Note: there is a deep hierarchy between hard forks and soft forks, and Core developers do not even agree to define past network issues in these terms)

Most of the conversation about hard forks so far has focused on Segregated Witness, which was originally proposed as a fix for transaction malleability but quickly morphed into a way to scale bitcoin via a soft fork that would increase the block size from the current 1MB to 2MB.

However, since Segregated Witness was proposed in December last year, the scaling debate has weakened as other improvements have brought optimizations.

Corallo said:

“Six months ago, the Bitcoin network was very crude. The network was really slow to propagate. We’ve been optimizing a lot of small things, and the accumulation of small things makes a big difference for people.”

Because Core developers have successfully optimized the network through efforts such as Corallo’s Fast Internet Bitcoin Relay Network (FIBRE) and mempool size limits, Corallo believes that the FIBRE network is more capable of handling the small block size increases that SegWit brings without a hard fork.

Even so, some remain committed to 'on-chain scaling', arguing that without more aggressive protocol changes (beyond tweaks and upgrades external to the Bitcoin protocol), the Bitcoin network, its user base, and its businesses cannot grow sufficiently.

Boring bickering and voting like a game

However, one of the biggest concerns of the Core team is that it is still difficult to know the community and how much of it is eager to upgrade.

This led to the rise of the term “consensus”: the approval or some level of agreement among participants in an economic network on certain terms and conditions.

The most obvious way to gauge community opinion is whether the terms or conditions are helpful, as these processes may not include all Bitcoin users or can be easily manipulated. For example, node voting is used to gauge the Ethereum network’s opinion on hard forks, but the practice has been widely criticized for its results.

Because most people who use Bitcoin do not run full nodes, using node voting will often leave out many users, including those who may be utilizing the network regularly.

Corallo believes that poor communication is one of the reasons why the Ethereum community has split in two. Although the majority expressed support for the hard fork after the The DAO attack, less than 10% of the community members participated in the vote.

Corallo believes that all mechanisms for measuring community consensus should be deployed. These measures include node voting; coin voting; measuring support and opposition on community discussion forums; and industry player opinion testing.

Corallo said:

“We don’t want to leave anybody out.”

Bitcoin Core contributor Peter Todd recently wrote a blog about hard fork proposals, arguing that this approach leaves out a lot of people, most notably those who lack a complete understanding of hard forks.

In an interview, he said language and privacy barriers could further complicate the situation, potentially excluding people who are unaware of the proposal or who don’t want to reveal their identities.

Propagating the Hard Fork

Corallo said that Core’s focus must be on writing technical specifications in a way that community members can understand. For example, if a bitcoin business reverts to the original path because it did not understand the hard fork and its impact, that is Core’s responsibility, a miscommunication.

While Corallo believes the community has cooled somewhat on the hostility toward hard forks that began last year, Todd believes the situation with Ethereum is giving the community pause again.

Peter Todd said:

“Understandably, a lot of people are skeptical about hard forks. It’s harder to convince people that a hard fork is a good idea now than it was six months ago.”

Core contributors say this argument is one of the reasons hard fork research and development is currently stagnant.

Todd said,

“I think this has discouraged Core developers from openly researching hard forks.”

He said a small group of people were working on the hard fork proposal in secret.

Core developer Cory Fields declined to comment on the hard fork, and others were equally unwilling to answer questions about the hard fork, which not only shows that the community is sensitive about the idea of ​​a hard fork, but also that Core developers do not always agree on the factors that affect their work.

Todd said,

“People are not used to these things being driven by money, like Bitcoin. I think it creates a different kind of tension.”

However, Todd said that in the next five years, the probability that the rules of the Bitcoin network will need to change is quite high. Specifically, improving the security of the network, such as improving , will prevent attacks on mining pools. Todd is not opposed to hard forks in the future.

Todd said:

“You need to have a good reason to hard fork; we just don’t have a good reason at the moment.”