Some forks are not as hard as they look!
The goal of this post is to help those that are new to the crypto or blockchain world to get a better feeling about this mysterious hard fork "event" that is scheduled for the next few days here on Steemit.
Not being a programmer myself and having researched bitcoin, blockchain, cryptocurrencies and fintech only for a few months now I assume that I'm not the only one trying to wrap my head around what this "hard fork" is, about which pretty much all of us have by now seen a system notification somewhere.
I don't even try to attempt to explain the technological side of it - as I'm sure there are many of us here much better qualified at - but I try to explain the philosophical implications as far as I see them since in my personal estimation the hard fork topic is one of the most important and most debated issues in the global crypto world.
The hard fork in the blockchain
If you have not read at least the abstract of Satoshis original paper - if not the entire 9 pages yet - I highly recommend you do so very soon at https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf.
It will not take a lot of time but you will be able to get a first grasp on why we are all interacting with this Steemit blockchain (for a recent presentation by Alex Tapscott about the "Blockchain Revolution" to Google engineers check out https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3PdO7zVqOwc ).
The blockchain is a dynamically evolving structure which we all are pretty much co-creating with our respective content while some programmer geniuses in the background are taking care of many important issues.
One of which is this so called hard fork situation.
As we collectively are co-creating this new economy around Steem and Steemit we lean on some concepts that have been synergized for the first time in history by Satoshi Nakamoto's white paper as well as his original code starting the Bitcoin phenomenon.
Give me control of a nation's money and I care not who makes it's laws
We can see Bitcoin as a value exchange system whos rules are governed by computer code rather than politicians and/or bureaucrats. The software trusts no one and cannot be fooled due to it's design.
A hard fork is a change to the original coded rules in the computer code and therefore by nature an irreversible alteration of the direction the respective blockchain is going in - hence a fork in the road of the dynamically evolving economy.
In order to get a feeling for the importance of such a hard fork situation we can probably compare this with the recent historical event in the federal reserve system of 2008 when president Bush announced the bailout of the "too big to fail banks" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_crisis_of_2007-08 ).
Depending on the source this "political hard fork" did cost $2.8 trillion and caused tremendeous suffering in its aftereffects.
Do not fear the hard fork
The 7 year old bitcoin community was able to not have to deal with a true hard fork situation to my knowledge while Ethereum which ranks in market capitalization just between Bitcoin and Steem just experienced a hard fork 3 days ago after the DAO situation ( https://blog.ethereum.org/2016/07/20/hard-fork-completed/ ).
As most of you know Steemit has been hacked recently which is why a hard fork was likely unavoidable ( https://steemit.com/steemit/@steemitblog/important-security-announcement-steemit-ceo-ned-scott ).
Unfortunately it is not conceivable to build a system without any possible flaws in the future, which is why an exponential approach towards perfection might be the best mankind can come up with ;-)
So none of us have to be afraid about our cutlery - I hope many of you are feeling somewhat relaxed now. Depending on the feedback I might write a future article about my personal experience in bending spoons and forks just to proof that NOTHING is impossible ;-)
May the hard fork be with us when @Dan & @Ned are flicking the switch!