Updates and forks

Hi
I would like to know if someone can explain the upgrade concept to me better. When are there updates forks?
Also I would like to know what Pow is, because I do not quite understand.
Thank you.

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The Bitcoin protocol is made by a set of rules. When their is consensus to change some of these rules, you basically fork the network. Sometimes you can have accidental forks when 2 miners broadcast a valid block at the same blockheight. Updates are sometimes necessary like every software needs updates. For example to fix a security issue or something.

So we have accidental forks wich will settle by the rule of the longest blockchain with most proof of work gets chosen by the nodes as the true valid blockchain.

Then you can have soft or hardforks wich are done by consensus of users, miners etcetera to change rules.

Hard forks are a change in consensus rules where new blocks aren’t compatible with the old rules. So the blockchain will split into a new path. Only if everybody updates to these new rules, there won’t be a split. But if a small minority chooses not to update and there are users willing to use it, you basically have 2 versions (like we see with bitcoin cash etc)

Softforks are a change of rules that are still valid according to the old rules, so the blockchain won’t split.

Proof of work is the amount of work that has to be done to mine a block. Miners need to create a block, add transactions init and provide some other data. In order to add a valid block on to the blockchain, this blockhash needs to start with a bunch of leading zero’s. This is very hard to achieve because hashing information looks random and impossible to guess. So in order to have your block hashed with leading zero’s, you need to add a random number (nonce) and hash it again and check if it now has enough leading zero’s (amount of leading zero’s depends on the mining difficulty. The more people mine the more difficult it needs to be to keep an average of 10 minute block interval)

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Thankss!! Good explication

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Ping me if you need more help. It’s not easy to explain this with a bunch of letters and numbers in a forum :slightly_smiling_face:

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