TIL - Not all changes to the Steem blockchain require a hardfork
I come from a development background, but a lot of the inner workings of the blockchain are still fairly esoteric to me. I have never been involved in blockchain programming before Steemit came along, so it is all new to me.
I have learned a lot through my interactions with Steemit development activities and running a witness node, but there is still a lot for me to learn. Yesterday/today - I learned something new!
I have always thought of the Steem/Steemit code as two separate pieces:
- The back-end Steem blockchain
- The front-end Steemit.com GUI
The front-end is controlled by Steemit, Inc. and they follow their own release process for deploying changes. There is nothing really stopping them from deploying a change any time they want.
Changes to the back-end blockchain code are a little bit more complicated. Up until yesterday, I thought they all required a hardfork. It turns out though, not all changes do!
@arhag and @sneak helped to clarify this.
- If the changes affect the consensus of the network (i.e. the rules that dictate account balances), then a hardfork is required in order for the changes to take effect.
- If the changes do not affect the consensus of the network though, then individual nodes can pick up the changes and start using them - without requiring the network to hardfork.
Basically what this means is that there are a lot of 'simpler' changes that can be made to the Steem blockchain API, which can be adopted by Steemit.com and other Steem nodes - without everyone having to go through all the trouble of a hardfork!
Very cool :-)
Oh I didn't know about that too! Thanks for sharing!
This is a very technical information for me, but seeing his enthusiasm I interpret that this is a very good news, thank you very much sir @timcliff for sharing this information
Welcome. It was in the context of discussing the glitch where you can only use 4 tags instead of 5 in order for the post to show up when you are browsing the 'secondary' tags. I originally thought we would have to wait for the next hardfork for it to be fixed, but they are saying it can be fixed without a hardfork :)
Now I am clear, this topic I already heard, are good news thank you very much Mr. @timcliff
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