Why can Ethereum easily solve the fork problem that has plagued the Bitcoin community for many years?

Imagine that one morning when you wake up from your sleep, you suddenly find that all your money has been stolen by an anonymous hacker. This money is almost all your belongings. And you have a month to find a solution.

Do you think it is impossible to solve this problem in such a short time? But this is indeed the dilemma that Ethereum developers and users have experienced.

In June this year, the Ethereum crowdfunding project DAO was unfortunately hacked, and the project funds were transferred to child DAO. The only solution to get the funds back is a hard fork. However, a hard fork will definitely modify the Ethereum code, and users will have to choose whether to upgrade, which is likely to lead to the risk of community division. During this period, opponents of hard forks have also emerged, accusing the development team of using the DAO incident to manipulate Ethereum.

Within just a few hours of the hard fork code being released, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin made a statement: The hard fork was a success, and nearly 85% of users have upgraded.

Bitcoin is the inspiration for Ethereum. Bitcoin users witnessed the success of Ethereum's hard fork and tweeted to express congratulations and respect to the Ethereum community, perhaps with a little jealousy. Because Bitcoin, like Ethereum, has been immersed in the frenzy of fork debates for many years.

Why was Ethereum able to easily solve the fork problem that has plagued Bitcoin for many years in just one month?

The most important factor should be the size of the community. Compared with Bitcoin, the size of the Ethereum community is relatively small, which makes it easier to reach consensus.

Stephan Tual, a member of the DAO founding team, once said that politics is part of Ethereum, just like the Bitcoin community. But I think the politics of the Bitcoin community will never work. Because they won't coordinate with each other, they will just hate each other.

Perhaps the word "hate" is too much, but the Bitcoin community has indeed been struggling with the issue of whether to hard fork. The point they are struggling with is whether hard fork will violate decentralization. They struggled so much that they finally drove core developer Mike Hearn away. When he left, he left with a harsh remark: Bitcoin is a failed experiment.

The internal divisions of the Bitcoin ecosystem are also very serious. Everyone puts their own interests first while ensuring that the system is not messed up. There are miners in the community who make a lot of money by processing block data, and there are also users who use Bitcoin to purchase cross-border services. It is precisely because the Bitcoin system is deeply rooted and people are too familiar with it that any changes will cause panic.

Tual said: Bitcoin is like a train running at 200 miles per hour. In order for it to go faster, a hard fork must be carried out, which requires a group of nerds to go to the front of the train to repair the engine. Who is willing to do it?

In contrast, Ethereum is still a relatively young platform with thousands of users and a killer application, DAO. Ethereum has put a lot of effort into DAO, and DAO has a large number of investors, so it is natural to have a hard fork (in the common interests of the community). In the case of Bitcoin's hard fork, if one party gains, the other party will definitely suffer financial losses.

John Biggs of Freemit, a bitcoin P2P payment startup, said: The bitcoin community is actually divided, so it is difficult to reach a consensus. As long as money is involved, no matter how open-minded people are, they will become conservative.

Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin also believes that the essential difference between Bitcoin forks and Ethereum forks lies in their communities.

However, he also mentioned that after this fork, if Ethereum encounters major problems again in the future, it will not be so easy to fork again at that time.

As the community continues to grow, it will become increasingly difficult to implement forks.

Tual said the smoothness of the Ethereum fork was also due to the “age” of the platform. He said hard forks were common in the early stages of a platform’s development.

In fact, this is the third hard fork in the history of Ethereum. The first was to upgrade the platform version, and the second is still in the planning stage, which is the so-called Metropolis stage.

In contrast, Bitcoin has never had a hard fork. If anything, there was a soft fork in 2010 due to a transaction vulnerability, which had nothing to do with a software upgrade.

Ethereum is a large experiment and can afford a few missteps for now, Tual said: Ethereum’s potential has not yet been fully realized, after all, we are still in the early stages of development.

The Bitcoin community is deadlocked on the topic of hard forks, which will eventually lead to its death. Tual said: As long as Bitcoin does not hard fork, it will not develop, and then it will be eliminated. As long as you cannot learn to develop, you will eventually be eliminated.

Biggs said the reason Bitcoin has not been able to develop further is because of the drag of centralized institutions such as banks and payment companies, which rely too much on blockchain technology and ignore Bitcoin.

My bet is that truly decentralized cryptocurrencies will eventually become a sideshow in the enterprise blockchain space.

This is also a question that Ethereum needs to think about.