Future Society A New Startup Just Proved That Blockchain Is Going to Utterly Transform Our Future The company sold of million in digital tokens in just 10 minutes Future Society Experts Are Gathering to Discuss How Blockchain Will Transform Our Future This could reshape the future of blockchain.Future Society Blockchain Is Helping Us Feed the World’s Hungriest Families The revolutionary tech can do more than secure finances — it can save lives.Future Society Blockchain Tech Has Never Been More Valuable or More Ready for World Domination Interest from Microsoft, Intel, and several large banks has the blockchain developer’s stock skyrocketing.Future Society In Case You Missed it, The Blockchain Revolution’s Officially Begun The applications are only limited by our understanding of the potential.Future Society Ethereum Is Poised to Become the Global Blockchain of Choice Microsoft, Intel, and BP all think it’s the database of the future.

Future Society Blockchain Will Completely Revolutionize How We Run the World Because in a world filled with digital dangers, nothing is more important than safety.Future Society Hard Fork: Blockchain Gets Stronger From Each Attack Bumps and bruises are a part of growth.Future Society What Venture Capitalists Got Wrong About Bitcoin Understanding the rapidly evolving world of digital currency.What is Zcash All About?Meet the untraceable cryptocurrency.The story goes a bit like this: Ethereum is a repository of smart contracts and their associated data.Because Ethereum is a blockchain, the said smart contracts are immutable, meaning their content cannot be changed unless they have been written to accept future modifications.This opens the door to unstoppable software applications, and, eventually, a techno-utopia, as described here by none other than Ethereum’s inventor, Vitalik Buterin.People build businesses on this entire concept, referred to as trustlessness.

For example, my company Slock.it broadens software autonomy to the physical world, ushering more profitable machine-to-machine communications.Both Augur and Gnosis build incorruptible predications markets.Very smart/successful people, including the developer of the first widely Internet browser, Marc Andreessen, go as far as equating Blockchains to the future of the Internet.Enter “Hard forks”.ethereum long term chartHard forks are seen by some as the arbitrary manipulation of the blockchain state to either revert, or outright rewrite smart contracts and their data by parties unknown, but likely looking like this guy:Except, that’s not what hard forks are at all.ethereum prison key dropQuite the opposite in fact.Here’s why: so called ‘soft forks’ are code modifications to software clients which, once implemented by 50–75% of the miners, change the consensus rules for everyone involved.bitcoin consensus protocol

You, as an end user, do not get a say whether you like these changes or not, only miners do.That’s because miners get a switch called ‘--block-the-silkroad’ or ‘--give-vitalik-10-million-ethers’ or, God forbid, ‘--dao-soft-fork’’.End user clients, including the Ethereum Wallet, have to follow.Soft forks are at best temporary and at worst borderline dangerous due to miner centralization leading to a bribing/spamming vulnerability.ethereum usage(I will cover this in a separate post).ethereum dash walletRegardless, they will soon become obsolete: a year ago, Vitalik predicted that address-blocking soft forks will be “outright impossible”, once again proving that he is indeed from the future.Hardforks on the other hand are entirely the decision of the end users, and no one else.bitcoin no devices detected

The “Attacker”, the “Intelligentsia” and even the Illuminati have no say.Only end-user clients choose which fork to follow, just like they choose to run Homestead, or to run Morden.Odds are, you are running Homestead right now, following the hard fork from Frontier in February.But you could have chosen to run whatever fork you like, even continuing to use Frontier, or even using your own Fork.It’s your choice.Any mined fork is a valid fork to follow.Does this mean we’ll live in a confusing world of multiple version of multiple clients, all implementing various governance or moral principles?For example, could we end up with a Geth version that allows for the Silk Road, but blocks child porn dapps and caps DAOs to 10 millions dollars?It’s unlikely, but again it’s ultimately your say, not the Ethereum Foundation’s.Outside the general protocol roadmap, what code changes are released as part of a client could be the result of a vote.For example, you could vote on-chain to see a new Parity client release implementing the hard fork change of your choice.

And if the Parity developers don’t listen, well, there are other clients out there.This is why client diversity is a good thing, but I’ll cover that in another article.Ethereum might have a shiny 1.0 label, yet it’s far from finished.In fact, it barely started on its journey to grow and evolve into Internet 2.0.Hard forks in Ethereum are upgrade mechanisms.Metropolis, Serenity, Ethereum 2.0, and everything in between until the fabled Ethereum 3.0 will be a hard fork.That we’re having a debate as to whether or not you have a say in their feature set is a good thing (tm).As for The DAO, the current soft fork is IMHO a good (temporary) first step, but only a hard fork will allow for a proper opinion survey as to what should happen next: hard fork and nearly 100% fund recovery, or no fork and likely total loss.Whatever the answer is, it will be final and truly categorical.And yes, parallels with Brexit do come to mind, so vote carefully when the time comes.So here’s the kicker: if you are against hard forks because you thought they represented the nuclear option or the jackboot of Vitalik the Evil Dictator, you’re wrong .