Bitcoin Forum

I saw that Vericoin was hard forked in response to a successful attack on Mintpal's system and I remember seeing somewhere that Bitcoin was hard forked once. I'm too new to Bitcoin to remember the circumstances, so could someone fill me in on the details?

BAM:
http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1a51xx/now_that_its_over_the_blockchain_fork_explained/

Bitcoin has hard forked twice. I was not around for the first one, but I panicked during the second.

it doesn't matter.

Why? Explain yourself

Forks are short-term emergencies for sure. They can result in large losses due to orphaned blocks individuals and companies may accept transactions from, but which don't "actually" transfer in whatever becomes accepted as the majority consensus protocol.

This is generally temporary and only affects transactions of a few minutes or hours -- a fork should usually only be a transition to new rules, and companies and individuals should know the network is effectively unsafe until consensus for the fork is established (ideally, this would all be readied before-hand, where everything can switch over in one block). A more problematic situation would come from competing chains which have competitive hashpower (and/or clients following different rules), where there's basically no consensus because the community's relatively evenly fractured. Since cryptocoins operate on consensus, lack of consensus clearly breaks it - it'd be "forking" back and forth - and Bitcoin business would effectively have to entirely shut down until a dominating consensus can be re-established.

Let's say there's a chain ("new Bitcoin") competing with "old Bitcoin." Let's say it was a rule change which needed a fork, and a large portion of users and miners are protesting by not switching to the new client/protocol. The rule differences will likely cause these chains to be incompatible with each other, where each will reject many or most transactions from the other protocol. If half of users and miners use old, and half use new, variance is going to "randomly" cause the "real" blockchain to go back and forth between old and new, and there'll be great uncertainty over which will eventually be the majority consensus chain, meaning transactions should NEVER be accepted as valid. There'll be this uncertainty until one side begins to dominate, which is the only time when transactions should be considered valid again. This uncertainty would effectively shut down everything Bitcoin.

Devs are currently discussing forking Bitcoin for various protocol changes. There's nothing wrong with this, and devs will be very cautious. It will take months or even a year from the Core team coming forward with the proposal for it to actually be implemented, and if there's wide disagreement, the fork will likely not happen since it'd threaten Bitcoin itself if people refuse the fork.

That's my understanding of it, anyway... fair chance I'm misinformed -- sorry if so.

The most recent Bitcoin hard fork was right when bitcoin's price really started taking off. It actually ended up acting as a confidence boosting event I think since the way it was handled was good.

The switch to LevelDB in Bitcoin Core 0.7.0 exposed an implementation limit in BerkeleyDB, which older versions were using. This caused new nodes to accept blocks that older nodes were rejecting due to database transaction failures. This caused a hard fork in the block chain. The response of the Bitcoin community was to downgrade miners to 0.6.* until a patch could be prepared for 0.7.1 to artificially reject blocks with a large number of transaction inputs, until the old nodes with the deficient database implementation could be phased out.

Indeed I do remember it quite well. It was handled in a good manner.

It was March 11, 2013. Details here:
https://bitcoin.org/en/alert/2013-03-11-chain-fork
Price dropped ~25%, but then recovered within a day.

Not all hard fork necessarily heal, there are currently 3 full-time developers working on Bitcoin, if this monetary system would be developed by say, Oracle, with +200 programmers working on it fulltime we wouldn't have that risk.

What are you trying to say? That the quantity of developers matters here? Something could go wrong even if we had not 3, not 30 but 300 people working on it.
The problem is that people panic when a hard fork is about to happen/happens. Else it should/could go smooth.

@OP Why is this relevant? This gives some people even more reason to spread FUD.

It recovered fast for sure, but back then bitcoin network was much smaller, and it was much easier to fork it.
If something is to happen now, and that hard forking is needed, we would have to begg the allmighty ghash.io to allow it, since they are only ones in the place to make such decisions.
That's why i hate bitcoin ever since asics came to life.

Wasn't around, either but from what I can tell, it actually went pretty smoothly and essentially fostered people's trust in Bitcoin. If Bitcoin survives such a hiccup, it is likely to survive minor things or another fork as well!

The quantity of dedicated developers matters here, if there were enough skilled developers the hardfork would be detected before it occurred.

You do realize that it had to be hard forked once, and that it was intentional? At the very begging right?
An error in the code would cause the coin to start forking on it's own.

As far as I know the second hardfork was done by mistake.

That was a long late night of staring at blocks being mined.  Slight panic set in, but it was one of the great roller-coaster rides of Bitcoin.

Not all hard forks are equal.

If a hard fork is due to a bug or introduction of a new function, it's one thing, it's understandable and will be accepted by most sensible investors.

If a hard fork is due to some exchange being hacked and then major players agree to hard fork to revert the consequences of the hack - it's centralization of power, opposite of the purpose of crypto currencies.

I remember that day and it was handled pretty rapidly. Lots of brix were shat though.

I still dont really understand what a fork is  :D

'Hard Fork'
When there are a sufficient number of bitcoin clients on the network that disagree on the rules about how blocks are created and recorded in the blockchain. It leads to a split in the chain, one set of bitcoin clients follow one branch and another set follows the other. To fix hard forks some action must be taken by us.

Woah, Bitcoin was hard-forked? NO WAY! That killy a crypto! Why would anyone do this? What are we paying the developers for???

I found the Cryptocoinnews article (http://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/news/mintpal-gets-hacked-pos-vericoin-fork-result/2014/07/13) about this. The vericoin developers essentially pushed a checkpoint that did not include the transaction.

This should not be able to happen with Bitcoin unless more than 50% of the hash-power is controlled by one entity. When Bitcoin developers push checkpoints, they are generally thousands of blocks deep.

Edit: looks like vericoin makes "minting" to cold wallets impossible:
-http://www.vericoin.info/interest.html (http://www.vericoin.info/interest.html)
(Bold, Emphasis mine)

"Cold storage" is actually actively discouraged.

Only 3 full-time developers for the future of money. This fact is an indication of just how early in this game we are...

you pay the developers?

seems you must be the only paying member of the bitcoin foundation left

 i do love the over use of the term "we" where in most cases the sentance where the 'we' is used doesnt include the person saying it, in reality

No, it's an indication of how a 8 billion market is being operated by people lacking basic business skills.

The first hard fork was way to early for me to remember it but from the second hard fork I remember that it was a new client that was not compatible to the old one, so people were told to revert or stay on the older Bitcoin client and that became the main chain.

There were a few double spends but it went fairly smoothly considering the problems that occurred there.

The March 11, 2013 hardfork.

 - http://bitcoin.org/chainfork.html
 - http://bitcoinmoney.com/post/47048259653
 - http://endthelie.com/2013/03/13/financial-crisis-revealed-and-resolved-in-the-world-of-bitcoin

No, you make it sound like a central "company" is responsible for Bitcoin, and that is not the case.
Sadly, the Bitcoin Foundation is paying the devs, are those the "people lacking basic business skills" who you are referring to?

I perfectly recall the March 2013 hard fork.

Not only I didn't panic, I even went "all in" with all the money I had previously planned to invest gradually in Bitcoin... And I did thank the panickers by heart.