Author: Tier Nolan 2015-05-07 21:24:45
Published on: 2015-05-07T21:24:45+00:00
The success of a hard fork in the Bitcoin network depends on the level of consensus among miners, merchants, and users. While a supermajority of 75% miners is sufficient, near-total consensus is required from merchants and users. If the majority of merchants and users update their systems, even if only 75% of miners do so, it can still result in a successful hard fork. Conversely, if 99.99% of miners update but only 75% of merchants and users do so, it can lead to a serious split of the network, resulting in blockchain stalls. Strong miner support for a hard fork is advantageous as it effectively kills the fork that follows old rules, leaving the 25% of merchants and users with a stalled blockchain. In case of multiple rule-sets, miners are likely to switch to the fork that is worth the most. However, the old ruleset is also likely to have some hashing power and would eventually re-target. Before any hard fork proposal can be considered, there needs to be rough consensus on what level of supermajority is needed to establish consensus. Gavin Andresen proposed in 2012 that a hard fork should require a supermajority of 99% of miners, while more recently, he has proposed 80%. Roy Badami believes that 80% is too low and suggests 35/36th of miners (approximately 97.2%) as the minimum for a comfortable level of consensus. The risk of forking Bitcoin into two competing coins is high without strong consensus.
Updated on: 2023-06-09T19:52:01.948559+00:00