- I thought that occurs when the softfork has more than 50% of hash power = no fork.
-But when it’s less than 50% there is a fork in the network. At least that was what was stated in the video. So if there is a fork in the network, would that now be consider a hard fork?
Are you sure this is what it was said? You don’t loose money of corse it just takes longer. But if you don’t take stale blocks into account, especially if your doing a large tx then the sender could potentially double spend the UTXOs used in a tx by creating a new one with a higher fee, invalidating the tx in the mempool.
I agree its a trick question (answer) and I have discussed with the team about it but at the moment there is little consensus to change it 
It would be a fork, but because of the longest chain rule, the fork would get invalidated. That is why its called a soft fork instead of a hard fork 
Got yall. but wouldn’t that just mean there really is no fork??
Well a fork can occur but gets resolved, kind of like accidental forks.
It seems to that a fork will only temporarily reduce security even though the community is split. The monetary incentive to mine will increase after the split, as a result new miners are likely to fill the gap as the monitory incentives go up.
So you are telling that two different miners are mining the same block? How can the same block have different information?
And this block height doesn’t really make sense. It’s really just the same time at least when considering the time it takes for information to travel.
Different miners are mining a different block at the same height, the contents are not the same. The height is the consecutive number of the block
Hi every one I have a question regarding soft forks. Any response will be really appreciated.
I think I understand hard forks. They are critical changes to the blockchain protocol that forces everyone to update or leave. This split the developer and mining community, creating a new network and a new currency with different attributes. You may choose to stay in the original blockchain or not.
But I still don’t understand the purpose of soft forks. It seems that they are protocol changes that are backward compatible with the old protocol, but makes some nodes (the ones that do not update) less productive as they lose validation capabilities or something like that. Soft forks seems to be a kind of bad thing unless 100% of the nodes update. Why do we need them if they introduce conflict and confusion?
Thanks in advance.
Exactly. That is not what the answer to the quiz says.
It is close but not exactly the same.
Different miners find a block at the same block height at the same time.
Different miners “mine” a unique block containing its own unique data at the same block height at the same time.
I just don’t think the question or the choices are worded very well, On option states “different content” and the other states the “same time” but omits the description of “different contents”.
Miners mine the same block at the same block height but with different contents
It’s not a trick question and if it is we don’t need trick questions. The right answer should include all the aspects we learned or were suppose to learn.
A soft fork is good because it enables outdated nodes to remain on the chain. This will probably be more important as time goes on. For example imagine a Bitcoin node that is embedded in your routers firmware. To be able to still use your node on the router you would prefer the network to have a soft fork or you would have to either buy a new router or update your firmware (if possible).
With more adoption it gets harder and harder to ensure the entire network will update to the latest version in time for various reasons like the example above. So you want to have a soft forks to be able for users to keep running their nodes.
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The correct answer does include all the aspects as you described. Different miners find a block at the same block height at the same time. But if different miners find a block you can assume they have different contents.
Thank you very much for your response Alko89. I really appreciated it.
Now I understand that soft forks are necessary changes to improve the protocol, that does not exclude any node from the main chain in the case they don’t update. And yeah… it is impossible to make everyone to update given the size of the network and the amount of participants.
But still… it seems that outdated nodes may have some kind of disadvantage for not having the latest firmware version, right? For example… what disadvantages may cause to not update your node to SegWit?
Its obviously disadvantageous, you can’t use the new features that updated nodes can, but you can still be part of the network.
In case of Segwit you can’t use segwit addresses and transactions and are vulnerable to malleability and have to pay higher fees.
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Is there any stats available on how many stale blocks present on network at any given moment? if a stale block and transactions in it are lost then how does the history is maintained? I mean there 'll be UTXO’s and received payments on a transaction if its lost doesn’t that break the chain? I am sure the possibility of this happening is very low but has it happened?
Wow. I have learned alot about bitcoin and blockchains so far. This reminds me of the bitcoin cash fork that just happened. I read that only one side would win out. There was a lot of unhappy community members as I remember Now I understand better the process. Much more to learn.
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There is no way of knowing if there exists two stale blocks at any given time until the propagate to nodes to find them, this is because of physical distances between nodes, that is why they must have rules for the nodes to be able to react once they encounter them.
Stale blocks are only an issue at the tip of the blockchain as more blocks are added to the blockchain it becomes less and less probable for the blocks to be dropped, its all about statistics and it never really drops to 0 but the probability of this occurring is negligible.
They are very rare and with more hash power in the network it gets harder and harder, they were more common at the beginning, now they occur less than once a year maybe. The last time that I know a stale block was found was in October last year:
https://twitter.com/bitmexresearch/status/1221673450986565633
Great info about forks, I would be interested to know on wick blockchains Could be done hard forks, for example, to start on one blockchain and then hard fork from it and take my community on a new blockchain in order to speed up the validation of transactions.