Nuts and bolts of a hardfork

[Witrebel]

Bear with me as I am not 100% up to speed on whats under the hood of crypto protocols.

Here is my basic question: 

What is fundamentally different about the steps that need to be taken to hard fork something like ethereum, vs Bitcoin?

In longer form, I understand Bitcoin to have value due to its well defined rules about rate of supply and the 21million coin cap.  Furthermore, as I understand it, only those people running full nodes can change the codebody running their node.  There is no way to "push" a hardfork.  Miners have more leverage because they are doing the work on the network, but the users could just fork away from PoW if they had to.  So essentially, Bitcoin is valuable because its deflationary and because it's rules can't be (easily) altered, and certainly not by any one party.

As I understand Ethereum, they have taken steps to mimic the deflationary nature of Bitcoin via the fixed rate of money supply, banking on a 1% annual rate of coins being lost.  So that more or less checks out.  But what is required to hard fork the Ethereum protocol?  Can the dev's "push" changes down to nodes?  Do they have more control over executing a hard fork?  Is the issue just that on principle they chose to violate the "code is law" mantra?  Or is the Ethereum protocol truly possible to be changed unilaterally?

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[TillKoeln]

a hardfork just means that you have not the control over the original sourcecode ^^

otherwise you would upload a mandatory update

[Witrebel]

Again, let me ask this.  Is their any fundamental difference in the way the bitcoin protocol works in comparison ethereum that allows ethereum to be forked by the developers whereas bitcoin cannot? 

Can the Ethereum developers actually mandate a hardfork or can the ethereum miners reject the decision? 

Was the decision to hardfork Ethereum after the DAO hack actually a "group decision" where the ethereum COMMUNITY decided that the hardfork was the right choice and that "code is not always law"? Or was it the dev's that pushed that decision down to the community at a technical level?

Could Bitcoin suffer the same fate?  Or is it technologically and fundamentally more resistant to being unilaterally hard forked?

I get the feeling it all comes down to what the miners want in terms of any PoW blockchain?

[BitcoinHodler]

it all comes down to consensus and reaching it.
if the community is small, meaning it only consists of exchanges, a small number of nodes that are mostly run by miners-services-exchanges and wallets, then enforcing a hard fork is easy. you just inform that an update is on the way and release it, surely enough majority is a small number of people and they will change and cause a hard fork to happen easily.

but when community becomes big. meaning apart from miners and services and all that, a lot of users all around the world are running nodes, then it becomes very hard to reach a consensus.

this is why bitcoin has problem these days. also the first fork that bitcoin had happened fast and easy, granted it was a bug not an upgrade.
and in comparison altcoins fork away left and right easily because you just have to inform the small miners and the exchanges about the fork and you are on your way.

As I understand Ethereum, they have taken steps to mimic the deflationary nature of Bitcoin via the fixed rate of money supply, banking on a 1% annual rate of coins being lost.

i am not sure how exactly their plans are going to work but the max supply of ethereum is not even set yet. there is no cap! and a lot of new coins are bing created each days.
and it is nowhere close to bitcoin.
bitcoin daily total reward is about 1800BTC
while ethereum total reward in one day is 27500 ETH (that is 15 times more)

[Witrebel]

it all comes down to consensus and reaching it.
if the community is small, meaning it only consists of exchanges, a small number of nodes that are mostly run by miners-services-exchanges and wallets, then enforcing a hard fork is easy. you just inform that an update is on the way and release it, surely enough majority is a small number of people and they will change and cause a hard fork to happen easily.

but when community becomes big. meaning apart from miners and services and all that, a lot of users all around the world are running nodes, then it becomes very hard to reach a consensus.

this is why bitcoin has problem these days. also the first fork that bitcoin had happened fast and easy, granted it was a bug not an upgrade.
and in comparison altcoins fork away left and right easily because you just have to inform the small miners and the exchanges about the fork and you are on your way.

i am not sure how exactly their plans are going to work but the max supply of ethereum is not even set yet. there is no cap! and a lot of new coins are bing created each days.
and it is nowhere close to bitcoin.
bitcoin daily total reward is about 1800BTC
while ethereum total reward in one day is 27500 ETH (that is 15 times more)

My understanding of the Ethereum "deflation" mechanism is a reliance on a 1% "natural destruction" rate of the coins, and the fact that the RATE of supply is currently fixed.  The idea being that the 1% rate of destruction will remain/scale with usage, and that the fixed supply rate will shrink as a percentage of total coins.  So that as time and adoption progresses, the rate of supply as a percentage of total coins will go down, and eventually the rate will be at or below 1%, such that an artificial cap is reached, if not a deflationary regime as the coins are destroyed faster than they are produced.  This honestly seems sound in theory.  My concern is how strictly must the ethereum protocol adhere to this roadmap?

Aka, if 10 years down the road, vitalik decides he wants to up the supply rate, can HE force that change, or must the same consensus be reached that bitcoin would need to reach to do something like change the 2016 block retargeting rate to 1008?  It's still up to the miners/nodes to adopt the new code right?

Or does PoS effectively nullify that?  Can he change the PoS contract unilaterally therefore voiding the "miners/stakers" ability to vote on a hardfork?

[Witrebel]

Bump for answers

[Witrebel]

Still unclear on this topic.  Essentially my issue is that I know the fundamental reasons why bitcoin is trustworthy as a protocol, and why it is resistant to censorship and bad actors.   I am not technically up to speed on ethereum nodes or other leading cryptos, and am under the impression (due to the DAO fork) that the dev's can unilaterally mandate a fork, without proper consensus.  Is this accurate? 

[achow101]

Still unclear on this topic.  Essentially my issue is that I know the fundamental reasons why bitcoin is trustworthy as a protocol, and why it is resistant to censorship and bad actors.   I am not technically up to speed on ethereum nodes or other leading cryptos, and am under the impression (due to the DAO fork) that the dev's can unilaterally mandate a fork, without proper consensus.  Is this accurate? 

No, that is not accurate for Bitcoin. It may be accurate for other coins where there is only one group of devs and what they say is what everyone generally goes along with. In Bitcoin, there are many groups of developers. Furthermore, because Bitcoin is so large, in order for any change to occur (whether hard fork or soft fork), more than just the developers are needed. Miners will be needed to produce blocks that conform to the new rules. Users are needed to run full nodes that accept the new rules. There are more than just developers in Bitcoin, and the developers cannot mandate that something happen; the community must accept it.