Comment by frankenst1 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by frankenst1 | Hacker News Reader

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> The claim is that [...] one of those [forks] is going to be dead.

This is much weaker claim than your original one (~"the market values popularity over technical features") and a much less controversial one.

> something like "the half-life of a fork is only X amount of time, so it's a very bad idea to try to pull one off".

> If you find that one of the forks still has, for example, 20% as much hash power as the other, you have disproved the claim.

Again, ETH was forked off the original Ethereum chain and won (it has ~98% hashrate) so it is not necessarily a bad idea to attempt one.

> There's no way [~10 year old Bitcoin 0.8.x nodes] are fully compatible.

You can download v0.8.1 here (https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/releases/tag/v0.8.1) and it should be able to fully sync the Bitcoin blockchain (i.e. including blocks mined today). If you use older clients for mining you might generate blocks that are ignored by other miners but your old client will still keep in sync and follow the same correct chain. (Something that is not true for ETH or Bitcoin forks).

According to your link you can apparently sync even older clients (e.g. v0.3.24) if you take care of non-consensus related bug fixes that would otherwise crash your client.

> This is much weaker claim than your original one (~"the market values popularity over technical features") and a much less controversial one.

You keep putting different versions of words in my mouth, but I would endorse that formulation of the "original". Popularity will crush technical features in a pretty short timeframe. The technical features have an opportunity to pull people in, but it is very limited and then that version will be pushed toward 100% or 0%. It is not sustainable to split the market, unlike most markets. You can compare different markets this way, seeing if it's true or false for that market, so it's definitely not a truism.

> Again, ETH was forked off the original Ethereum chain and won (it has ~98% hashrate) so it is not necessarily a bad idea to attempt one.

It means it's a bad idea to try to split things, because even in that case splitting didn't work.

So you'd better be damn sure that a powerful majority will want your version. You can't rely on merely many people wanting it.

Also, you don't think that having it be named Ethereum is a bit of a special case?

If you fork bitcoin or ethereum, you won't be taking the name with you.

Forks are arbitrary. There's no need to literally gather 51% consensus, it just means users of Fork A are in an entirely different universe than Fork B and that's fine.

For example when BTC split into BTC and BCH, for me the ticker for Bitcoin went from BTC to BCH because BCH was the continuation of "real bitcoin". And the absurdly-small-blocks crowd obviously felt the opposite. And that's completely fine.

One of the most pernicious beliefs of the BTC crowd is that a hard fork is some evil, unforgivable thing. It shows a total misunderstanding of how free software works.

> One of the most pernicious beliefs of the BTC crowd is that a hard fork is some evil, unforgivable thing. It shows a total misunderstanding of how free software works.

It's not about software, it's about network effects when the only thing giving a coin value is those network effects. Nobody cares if you fork the software. Diverse software is encouraged!

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