It's pretty common for Altcoins to make hard forks and while I do not always agree with hard forking (I think it should be avoided at all costs when possible), there are times and valid reasons when a hard fork is a necessity.
For example if the altcoin needs to implement a new difficulty adjustment algorithm (while not always a good reason, lets say the current one has a serious flaw).
The process is always:
- Announce the impending hard fork.
- Hard code it at a specific block number.
- Rebuild wallets.
- Force everyone to update to the new wallet.
This relies on centralization.
From what I understand Bitcoin includes a built-in voting system for hard forking. The block version is increase and after a certain percentage of the last mined blocks meet a threshold (I think it's 80%), the chain will hard fork.
Why is this not used instead?
Is it a technical reason?
Or is it simply because altcoin developers don't understand or know how to make use of the voting system?
