Steemit Crypto Academy [Beginners’ Level] || Season 3 Week 4 || Blockchain Forks || Done By @preshdan || 100% Power-Up
I want to welcome every one to this week 4 of season 3 and also I want to thank professor @awesononso for his applaudable lecture. This week's task is an extension of the previous week's lesson centered on Blockchain Fork.
To that effect, I welcome everyone on board, so let's get started
1.What is a Fork? (In your own Words)
Fork in blockchain can be defined in various ways but however, it can be said to be what occurs when a blockchain runs apart into two potential forward paths. Forks are associated to the fact that various parties have the necessity to make use of mutual regulation, law or guideline to maintain the history of the blockchain. When there isn't agreement among parties, alternative chains may come forth. Although most forks are short-lived, some last for an indefinite long time. Short-lived forks are as a result of to the state of arriving speedy consensus in a distributed system being difficult. Whilst on the contrary permanent forks - in the sense of changes in protocol - have been used to annex new structure to a blockchain, they can in addition be used to change to the opposite direction the result or outcome of hacking like the case with Ethereum and Ethereum Classic, or ward off disastrous or catastrophal bugs on a blockchain.
Forks, in Blockchain, have been commonly or generally debated in the circumstance of the problem of bitcoin scalability. Forks can take place in any crypto-technology platform, and as mentioned earlier, forks that are short-lived are as a result of the complexity of arriving consensus within the system because not more than users within the network have the authorization to officially sanction or confirm transactions for modifications.
Forks can be categorized into "Accidental and Intentional forks. Accidental forks occur as soon as two or more blocks are built or found at selfsame time, and it is solved again when following blocks are annexed, and one of the chains result to being more extended than the other. The blocks that are in the shorter chain are abandons by the blockchain network then, which is referred to as orphaned blocks.
The intentional forks being the second group of blocks, changes the form or structure of the blockchain rules and brings into the group two various types, which include hard forks and soft forks.
2.Explain in details what a Hard Fork is with examples (Can be of any blockchain).
Hard fork in blockchain technology, refers to a thoroughgoing change to the protocols of a blockchain network. In the simplest term, a hard fork breaks up a single cryptocurrency into two and ends up in the act of checking or proofing the validity of blocks and transactions that previously were invalid, or vice-versa. As such, it demands that every developers improve to the most recent version of the protocol software.
Consequently, a hard fork takes place the time the software that executes on the full nodes to operate as a network participant is changed or altered.
The modifications are such that the recently made blocks mined are guided by regulations or laws in the blockchain protocol and are not regarded valid by the older version of the software. As soon as a hard fork occurs, a new currency is brought into existence. Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum and Ethereum Classic are examples of the hard fork. An even or equivalent amount of the new currency is divided into portions and dispensed among the full nodes who decided to improve or to bring up to date their software to make sure that there is no loss of material. Such hard forks most of the time give rise to conflict within the cryptocurrency community.
The ultimate decision to come into the company of the newer or older chain is dependent on the full nodes. Supposing a node selects the new chain, then the software has to be improved to assist carry out newer transactions. In the meantime, the nodes that desire or request to attach to the older blockchain don’t have to improve their software.
Hard fork are of two sub-categories which are Planned Hard Fork and Continuous Hard Fork
- Planned Hard Fork
This is a software upgrade to a protocol that is determined in advance. It is an improved component that had previously been made free from ambiguity or doubt by developers. Usually, before the hard fork takes place a high degree of consensus among all stakeholders is arrived.
- Continuous Hard Fork
A continuous hard fork takes place as a result of a condition of not agreeing or concurring between different stakeholders in a project. It regularly occurs for the reason that one group believes in the intended changes or improvement, and another perceives no necessity for the changes.
Ethereum Classic
The objective of the group that pioneered the fork was to drive the blockchain back to a position prior to the hack, consequently bringing back the lost funds. Ethereum blockchain being the original champion Ethereum Classic, all the way back to the genesis block, perceived that during the same time it at first seemed right to bring back the stolen funds, there was a very ethical reason not to do so. According to the declaration of Independence of ETC, there were several formal complaint held against the members founding Ethereum, most of which repeatedly reflected around actions taken which were in a contrary direction to the principles of decentralization.
Most imperatively however they stated a new fact that a hardfork to bring back the lost DAO funds desecrated two indispensable aspects of what offers peer-to-peer cash and smart contract-based systems value: immutability and fungibility.
3.Explain in details what a Soft Fork is with examples (Can be of any blockchain).
Soft fork refers to the modifications or alterations put into practical use to a blockchain for modifying or annexing any functionality sans being the cause of any basic structural change. It terminates further validity of older transactions or blocks for the network nodes who have determined to go after the new consensus rules. Nevertheless, it still permits the nodes going after the old consensus regulations or guidelines to consider more recent transactions or blocks as valid. Hence, a soft fork is backward-compatible, which happens to be its differentiating distinguishing feature with the more usually known hard fork, which ends or terminates forward compatibility for all old consensus-following network participants.
One relevant part of cryptocurrency soft forks is that they don’t require all miners on the network to concur to execute the new code, it can be put into practical use with the majority of the miners coming to terms on it. This permits network improvements to be carried in a more rapid manner and keep away from causing a notable rift in the community. In addition, it can be a result of a miner's mistakes supposing the old nodes desecrates new regulation or guideline that they aren’t aware of. The only way to turn a soft fork to the opposite direction is through a hard fork.
Over the years, Bitcoin and Ethereum's blockchains have effected several soft forks for the purpose of improving the network, fixing issues or enhancing functionality, sans plying the more contentious hard fork route of compelling each miners to concur on the new consensus regulations or guidelines, which would execute the risk of splitting the network. A typical and commonly known example of a soft fork is the Bitcoin Segwit upgrade, which permits increase of block capacity by getting rid of signature data from the transactions.
A soft fork is portrayed as a fork in the blockchain which can take place when old network participants do not follow a regulation which newly upgraded nodes follows. This might cause old nodes to receive data that appear invalid to the recently made nodes, or become out of sync sans the user noticing. This is contrary to hard-fork, in which the node will put an end to processing blocks owing to the changed rules instead. The soft fork is also known as backward-compatibility.
There are two types of soft fork:
- Miner Activated Soft Fork (MASF)
This is a type of soft fork in which miners have the alternative of accepting the recently made update or not. Miners may put into action the soft fork making use their hash power. They can make a modification in the bit number of blocks they are mining. Supposing they arrive a certain number of mined blocks with the recently made version of bit numbers, the whole node can bring into effect the recently made consensus regulations or guidelines.
- User Activated Soft Fork (UASF)
In User Activated Soft Fork, the soft fork is activated by nodes at a specified time. The modification take place on a determined date and time. All the nodes are demanded to put into use consensus regulations. They also need to decline all the transactions and blocks that do not cleave to these recently made rules. In spite of this, miners can choose whether or not to apply the recently made update, and the nodes can accept or decline their work. Nonetheless, in doing so, miners also stand the risk of losing the resources used to find the block.
Segregated Witness (SegWit)
Segregated Witness (SegWit) is the most famous example of a soft fork added to the Bitcoin network on August 23, 2017. SegWit was brought into existence out of the necessity to increase or scale the capacity of Bitcoin’s transaction throughput. The intended solution wasn't complicated simple yet elegant, reduced the transaction size and at the same time raise the maximum block size capacity for the purpose of improving the number of transactions that are included in each block.
At first, Bitcoin was created with a block size limit of 1 MB. In view of that, one block is mined nearly every 10 minutes and the average transaction size is approximately 500 bytes, this implies that Bitcoin at first had a max potential throughput capacity of around 2000 transactions per block. The update of SegWit improved Bitcoin’s throughput by raise the block size and weight limit to 2 MB and redusing the size of the average transaction of SegWit by approximately 60%. It successfully finished this by segregating the signature (also known as witness) associated with individual transaction from the transaction data and emitting it via a distinct messaging channel.
The beauty of the Segregated Witness update is that it let non-improved nodes to check or prove the validity of SegWit blocks and transactions without any problems consequently not activating a hard fork or a unending split of the Bitcoin blockchain.
4.What are the differences between Hard Forks and Soft Forks?
Hard forks is a permanent divergence in the the block chain, which frequently takes place when non-upgraded nodes cannot check or prove the validity of blocks made by upgraded nodes which go after more recently made consensus rules. Soft forks is a impermanent divergence in the block chain resulting from by non-upgraded nodes not going after recently made consensus rules
Hard and soft forks are necessary or of high importance in the long-term success of blockchain networks. They give ability to upgrades in a decentralized system, in spite of the lack of a central authority. While both forks produce a split, in a soft fork only a lone blockchain stays valid. On the other hand, a hard fork ends up in two blockchains that be side by side.
Ultimately, hard forks and soft forks performs two very diverse purposes. Soft forks are typical manner put into practice to include small modifications on the network, while hard forks are required for big modifications to the network, many times resulting in a new cryptocurrency.At some point, Hard forks seem to be controversial, in which developers have offered notion that are radically distinct to how others desire to see the network change. Hard forks permits the new ideas to be put into practice while those not concurring can proceed with using the network as is.
5.Explain the following Bitcoin Forks and explore the blockchain where necessary. Indicate if they are hard forks or soft forks;
Bitcoin Cash
Segregated Witnesses
In August 2017, Bitcoin cash was made out of a hard fork of Bitcoin. Bitcoin Cash raised the size of blocks, permitting more transactions to be processed and making improvement on scalability.Bitcoin cash was developed to find the an answer or solution to some of bitcoin's issues as it grew more common among the general public
Bitcoin, which executes on a decentralized ledger system referred to as blockchain, can process only a max of seven transactions per second, which makes it a less-than-ideal crypto for daily transactions.
In 2018, Bitcoin cash split in two, producing another fork called bitcoin SV, which, having a market value of approximately $8 billion, is ranked currently at 19th on the top digital currencies list on Coinbase.
Compared to Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash was created to adapt a larger block size, permitting more transactions into a sole block. In spite of their philosophical divergence, Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin have several technical resemblances. They make use of selfsame consensus mechanism and have capped their supply at 21 million.
Bitcoin Cash was forked in November 2018 and divided into Bitcoin Cash ABC and Bitcoin Cash SV (Satoshi Vision). Bitcoin Cash ABC is currently known to as Bitcoin Cash now. Ultimately, Bitcoin cash is a Hard Fork
SegWit refers to the process increasing the block size limit on a blockchain by means of discarding or removing signature data from bitcoin transactions. At such time as certain parts of a transaction are dismissed or discarded, this frees up space or capability to annex more transactions to the chain.
Segregate means to separate, and witnesses refers the transaction signatures. Therefore, segregated witness, in brief, means to separated transaction signatures.
SegWit is an action relating or belonging to Bitcoin which is designed to assist raise the block size limit on a blockchain.
SegWit aids the increase of the block size limit by dragging signature data from Bitcoin transactions. Hence, the term SegWit points to separate, or segregate, and to witnesses, which is the transaction signatures.
6.Write on the Steem and Hive Hard fork and show similarities in their Genesis Blocks(Provide screenshots).
Subsequently to Justin Sun's take over of Steem, the community resolute to hard fork the Steem blockchain. They were in contrary direction to platform centralization. In order to keep their funds from control, a recently made Hive platform came in sight. The Hive hard fork led by the community was successful, subsequent to weeks of opposition between the Steem (STEEM) community and Justin Sun. During the newly admitted hard fork, a secondary representation of the blockchain was made so that every content published on Steem including wallet balances emerged on Hive. HIVE tokens was freely given to every users, whose Steem accounts were blocked.
On March 20, the Steem network was hard forked by Hive, airdropping HIVE tokens to holders of STEEM 1:1, not including the founder’s reward.
STEEM has encountered volatility to an utmost degree over recent weeks, alongside Sun’s takeover of the Steem network apparently to causing prices to move down 60% betwixt Feb. 14 and March 18.
Hive gave a public notice that it would fork the network on March 18, putting in motion a price spike of above 200% in 18 hours. Nevertheless, prices have since undergone a sudden and severe downturn more than 50%. Great number of STEEM’s buying pressure emanated from investors attempting to acquire or gain HIVE.
Steemit Home Page
Hive Blog Home Page
Their Genesis Block similarities
To check the similarities between the two, steemworld.com and hiveblog.com will be visited. So lets get started with Steem Genesis Block at https://steemworld.com/
The highlighted part of the Steem block are:
- The Timestamp; being 2016-03-24, 17:05:00
- Witness being initminer
- The producer reward having initmine as the Producer and Vesting Shares of 1.000000 VESTS
Nest is to check Hive, at https://hiveblocks.com/
The Block data opens. Obviously, the Mining date is the same as that of Steem with an hour difference in time. As explained by professor @awesononso, the little cake most likely indicates when the blockchain was born.
Click on "Show raw virtual op data" for more view of data (shown below)
The data box comes up (shown below)
It is obvious that the both platform has the same miner @initminer as well as number of vests.
Checking Block 400 on both blockchains;
It is observed that *Timestamps (with a slit difference) and the miner is @initminer for both chains.
This is a prove that both Steem and Hive share a common immutable history.
This is my entry Professor @awesononso, am impressed by the lecture and the information I have been able to gather in the course of the homework task. Thanks for reading through.
Cc:.
Hello @preshdan,
Thank you for taking interest in this class.
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