Hard forks

English General Discussions
1

Just listened to the Decentralized whiteboard talk and as always I am impressed with Charles’ analytical thinking and with the scientific approach of the Cardano team. The one question I have is what is the thinking on hard forks and their inevitability or lack thereof? Let me explain. It seems obvious to me that Bitcoin has proven that the lack of governance has lead to conflicts where a technical debate can lead to no resolution and a hard fork is the only solution. For the most part bitcoiners seem to see this as okay.

What is the Cardano view? Obviously Voltaire is toted to provide the distributed governance which bitcoin lacks but is it expected to settle any and all future debates? Asked another way, is there always expected to be one and only one Cardano or on the other extreme are forks seen as inevitable and the possibility of a Cardano Classic seen as an acceptable solution to irreconcilable differences (at least theoretically)?

2

Bitcoin forks because someone wants to do something with the token, which they can’t with bitcoin. So it is forked and a new token and blockchain is created to add some overlay code.

Cardano can be built on without the need to hardfork a new blockchain or token, but this has to be voted in by the community.

However, Cardano is open source and there is nothing stopping someone hardforking it to create a new blockchain and token… I wouldn’t be surprised if this happens one day. Just hope they are a bit more inventive with the name. Other than ‘cardano classic’ etc.

3

Thanks. That’s pretty much what i guessed.