Hey guys,
Can someone please explain to me what a fork is?
And how it can happen?
Thanks.
And no, I'm not talking about an eating utensil.
Sure, mate, but you need to think of the eating utensil, though
The block chain starts at the top of the handle and works its way down. When it gets to the part that splits into the pointy parts, there are many options. A fork is the prongs on the side, while the main chain is the handle continuing through the eating part
If you are mining on a forked chain, when you sync back up to the correct chain, the coins mined from the block you got on the wrong path will not be valid, but everything prior to that block will be valid
The reason people are surprised it didn't happen to CDC is the fast blocks. 8 seconds is rare to have no forks at launch, but we prevented instamining by syncing 10 nodes at 1 block each (with only 40,000 as the reward so no premine). We then made new clients for all the nodes, switched over to a fork, and increased the block reward to the planned 1,000,000 CDC per block start. Once we get an explorer up, you guys can verify that
Essentially, we hard forked it before release with 10 synced nodes to prevent mini forks from happening
