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Blockchain Complete Guide  

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Type Of Fork and Fork Properties

If a blockchain

1. diverges into two potential paths forward,

2. has a change in protocol

3. a situation that occurs when two or more blocks have the same block height

Forks are created because different parties need to use different methodologies to maintain the history of blockchain. When participants are not in agreement, different chains may form. Forks could be short-lived as well as permanent. Short forks could emerge because of difficulty in reaching consensus in a large network while permanent forks could emerge because of need for new features, change in protocol, for security concerns or some bug in the existing chain.

One major example of Forking happened between Bitcoin and Bitcoin classic.

Properties of Forking

  • Forking could be accidental or intentional.This situation could arise if two or more miners found the new block at the same time and because of the flaw in the chain, few network participant gets agreed on one block while others are sticking to block generated by another participant.
    Such kind of forking will be resolved when one of the branched-chain become longer than the other.

Hard Fork

In this type of Forking, software validation according to old rules will see the blocks produced according to new rules as invalid and after forking blocks are incompatible with old blocks

Nodes who want to comply with Forked chain will have to upgrade their software.

E.g. Ethereum decides to Hard Fork for investors in "The DAO" (which we will cover in Ethereum section). In this scenario, we had a hard fork between Ethereum and Ethereum Classic.

Soft Fork

In the Soft Forking, old network nodes do not follow a rule followed by upgraded nodes.

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