Blockchain Upgrades & Hard Forks

Welcome to OurDecentralizedFuture where we talk about Blockchain Upgrades & Hard Forks

Hello hello!

So 7 days ago the Hive blockchain upgraded via Hardfork 25 and in the same week The Koinos Group launched their testnet. Both projects took a huge amount of work and were super successful... and both had a couple of little niggly things that weren't ideal...

... in episode 4 of OurDecentralizedFuture, we talk about the different processes the two blockchains go through to make changes. Obviously they are very different blockchains in very different stages of their lives, but we discuss a comparison of the architecture in regards to making technical changes.

Podcast

Andrew and I talk about the recent testnet release of Koinos, and how its incredible upgradeability has already saved time and improved the platform in our podcast called Blockchain Upgrades & Hard Forks.

Here is the Spotify link to our chat and you can click play on the embedded audio below:

https://open.spotify.com/episode/0kgX4S01fbN7rvH3GDKPq7?si=yopb8tj6T0qcX1KbKAuDtA&dl_branch=1

You can also watch it on YouTube if you just prefer to see our smiley faces as we talk about the things....

If you prefer your content a little more decentralized, then here we are on the amazing Cinnamon Video.

Blockchain Upgrades & Hard Forks

A Hard Fork is essentially a change to the code that runs a blockchain.

On normal software, code changes happen all the time... I mean, hell, Windows seems to be patching my PC every 20 seconds with something... and have you ever bought a game the day it comes out... and you still have to download a massive patch before you can even start it?

In the internet age, code updates to everything happen all the time... but with blockchain technology that's not possible. Blockchain technology is amazing because a whole network of computers have to agree on what is official... every transaction on a blockchain requires it to be verified and confirmed, often by the majority of all the computers in the network.

Blockchain networks exist to basically say 'this digital code is the official code' - before blockchains, you could copy and paste anything digital as much as you wanted... but this also means that upgrading the code that a blockchain runs on also requires everyone to get on board...

Bitcoin's history of hard forks

Source

If the entire network agrees on a code change, they all have to download and start running the updated code at the same time... the old code still exists but just no one cares about it. When the network doesn't agree on a code change, either it gets defeated (ie, no one runs it) or the chain splits as we can see above with Bitcoin Cash, etc.

A hard fork is a big code change that really requires everyone to get on board for it to run smoothly... a soft fork is a smaller change that isn't critical for everyone to adopt it immediately.

In the case of Hive... the Hive Blockchain has had many hard forks (25 I guess...) but the split from Steem to Hive was the most dramatic and now both the Steem blockchain and the Hive blockchain are free to do their own hard forks without affecting the other, they're essentially completely different and separate blockchains.

The really interesting thing about the Koinos Network is that they've designed it in a way to make code upgrades easy, and Andrew provides a really good example of this on the podcast.

We'd also love it if you could possibly follow OurDecentralizedFuture twitter account if you're feeling follow-y:

https://twitter.com/OurDecentraliz1/status/1412918205358673923

Andrew (Hive account@andrarchy) and I have been chatting for a while before we created this podcast. If you’re interested in learning more about Koinos, here are some of the previous chats with Andrew …