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As far as I understand there's a build in ice age/difficulty bomb every year so that clients that don't follow the hard fork will essentially stop working. This
by Galaxeblaffer 9y ago
As far as I understand there's a build in ice age/difficulty bomb every year so that clients that don't follow the hard fork will essentially stop working. This incentivizes/forces clients to update and also effectively minimizes the chance of a chain split where some group would just keep running on the old chain. If someone wants to make a chain split, they will have to fork too
- rrobukef 9y agoIt's just as easy to create a second hard fork disabling the bomb if some group wants to keep the old rules.
- DennisP 9y agoSure, but it at least prevents the legacy chain from having an advantage due to inertia.
- Obi_Juan_Kenobi 9y agoYes, but that requires some group to agree on this and to run new code, even if it only removes the difficulty bomb. This is not as trivial as you make it out to be, especially because some individuals that may disagree with the 'main' development branch may also still value the difficulty bomb. It's obvious that this does not prevent disagreement about the protocol, but it greatly affects a fairly large class of disagreements and changes the incentives for a variety of behaviors. It's all game theory, and as such minor changes to the premise of a 'game' can have large impacts on how it plays out. It's not perfect, but I think it is good.