Ethereum hard fork sparks heated discussion in Bitcoin community

Editor's note: The successful implementation of the Ethereum blockchain hard fork has become a hot topic, and it has caused heated discussions in the Bitcoin community at home and abroad. /r/btc has many hot posts about this hard fork, while /r/bitcoin has only one post about the hard fork due to the severe censorship. On the domestic Babbitt forum, netizens' opinions are also very heated.

Comments from overseas communities

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said on Twitter:

“I hope we can rethink hard forks and see them as a graceful upgrade/voting mechanism, rather than being afraid of them because they will create multiple coins.”

/r/btc active user ydtm posted:

Bitcoin Core chief maintainer Wladimir van der Laan once said that Bitcoin cannot be hard forked because of the "subprime mortgage bubble crisis in 2008" (??). He also said that "changing the rules in a decentralized consensus system is a difficult problem, and I don't think we can solve it quickly," but Ethereum just did it!

To quote Wladimir van der Laan:

"If we learned anything from the 2008 subprime mortgage bubble, it's that nothing can grow exponentially over time, and if it does, it can be very dangerous.
…
…A hard fork can be difficult to coordinate. Even if it involves only a single parameter change, every full node user will have to upgrade. Changing the rules in a decentralized consensus system is a very tricky problem, and I don’t think we’ll be able to solve it anytime soon.

Original address: https://www.weusecoins.com/wladimir-van-der-laan/
”
The above quotes suggest that Wladimir van der Laan may be too paranoid and that Bitcoin currently needs a simple and secure on-chain expansion.

However, due to severe censorship, all topics related to Ethereum hard fork were deleted in another community /r/bitcoin. In this regard, Shapeshift CEO Erik Voorhees joked: "If the news is unfavorable to Ethereum, then /r/bitcoin will allow such discussions. But if the news is favorable to Ethereum, then /r/bitcoin will delete them for being 'off topic'."

Currently, the only post on /r/bitcoin about the hard fork is:

https://np.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/4tqodc/lets_talk_hard_forks_the_most_exciting_area_of/

The top reply was from Joloffe: ...Ethereum has proven that a 'contentious' hard fork is conceivable and did so without causing loss of (ether) coins or significant market volatility. Now, it's your turn, Bitcoin.

The following is a reply from brg444: “This kind of thing can only show the degree of centralization of Ethereum… A hard fork is essentially a manifestation of centralization, which will inevitably deprive some users of their right to choose.

…

I guess you want Bitcoin to become as easy to manipulate as Ethereum.”

TheRealFaded: 5.5% of users spoke in this vote... and one of those 5.5% has a ton of ether. Voting is based on ether amounts... I can buy a bunch of ether and completely change the outcome... this is pretty fucked up.

Comments from the Chinese community

Jiang Zhuoer, founder of the Litecoin Mining Pool, posted on the Babbitt forum: "The failure of Ethereum's soft fork (due to a code bug) proves that, in order to achieve the same goal, the forward-compatible soft fork code is much more complex than the hard fork code, so it is more likely to have bugs and is more dangerous. The segregated witness soft fork, which claims to have "modified the underlying architecture of Bitcoin" and "almost modified every line of Bitcoin code", is even more dangerous. No one can guarantee that there are no bugs in the thousands of lines of modified code. If segregated witness is to be implemented, it should be implemented with a simple and clear hard fork. Ethereum's successful hard fork proves that Bitcoin's hard fork is not as dangerous and unfeasible as Core threatens."

Shui Wuhun replied: "Hard fork is inevitable in the development of digital currency, and it will come sooner or later. Hard fork is the ultimate weapon for digital currency to deal with crises. It is with this weapon that Bitcoin can become an indestructible cockroach. What's funny is that some Bitcoin believers fear hard fork as if it is the end of the world. I really doubt whether these people really understand Bitcoin."

From vatten’s point of view: “The fact that Ethereum’s controversial hard fork was successfully implemented tells us several things:

1. Even if it is a controversial hard fork, no one dares to stick to the minority hashrate chain. Especially for large mining pools, every extra hour of sticking means a loss of tens of thousands. Even if the supporters of the minority hashrate chain really think that their ideals are greater than the consensus of the entire community, it will take a lot of time and money to stick to a branch without majority consensus for several years, and the hope of success is not great.

Second: The entire hard fork process from discussion to implementation took only one month, and from reaching consensus to starting to write code to publishing and then forking took only one week, which fully demonstrates that in the IT era, the entire community has a strong ability to quickly coordinate and reach consensus. Considering the larger scale of the Bitcoin community, it is more than enough to reach consensus in one year and notify mining pools, exchanges and nodes to prepare for the hard fork in one month.

3. Hard forks do not cause monetary losses to those who support the majority of hashrate chains. After the successful fork of Ethereum, the price of the winning chain immediately soared by 10%, and has now risen by more than 8%.

In addition, from a software engineering perspective, hard forks require all clients to upgrade, thus avoiding the problem of soft forks that generate code to deceive old clients in order to maintain compatibility with old clients. This is more ideal in terms of system security, future code maintainability and readability, and the coordination and consistency of the entire network nodes."

Bitcoin Core developer Long Shao has a very different view. He said on Weibo:

“The Bitcoin ecosystem has no mechanism to guarantee that the Ethereum hard fork incident will not happen again in Bitcoin. As long as there is a consensus, anything can be changed. [Nothing Is Impossible], the Ethereum hard fork opened Pandora's box, and the consequences are serious.”

What do you think about this hard fork?