digitsu/hard fork rebuttal by digitsu

## hard fork rebuttal by digitsu
>Peter Todd: https://petertodd.org/2016/soft-forks-are-safer-than-hard-forks
>This time the blocks from miners adopting the fork are considered invalid by the those who haven’t adopted, because the blocks violate >existing rules. So the non-adopting miners build on each others blocks, creating two separate chains. There’s no limit to how long the >old chain gets;

No theoretical limit. But certainly a very large economic limit as miners not on the majority fork is losing 10k every 10minutes. To ignore this is to ignore economic realities and focus only on theoretical hypothetical situations.

>transactions on the old chain can easily get 6+ confirmations even though they’re considered invalid by the majority of hashing power.

6 confirmations on a losing minority fork of 25% (in reality it will be a lot less) will take 4hours, instead of the normal 1h. You (wallet operator) would _certainly_ notice something is wrong.

>This is a serious problem! Currently most (all?) SPV wallets don’t even check the block version,

In addition a network wide alert would be sent to all nodes notifying you of the impeding hard fork (with grace period) signalling your need to upgrade.  You would really have to try hard to ignore everything, in which case, assuming the ones who do, may only number around the same 5% as in Soft Forks. (and your 6 confirms would take loooong...6 confirmations would be 20hours!!!) and that means its costing you even more money, and realistically no one would be silly enough to keep this fork going.
	>Peter Todd: https://petertodd.org/2016/soft-forks-are-safer-than-hard-forks
	>This time the blocks from miners adopting the fork are considered invalid by the those who haven’t adopted, because the blocks violate >existing rules. So the non-adopting miners build on each others blocks, creating two separate chains. There’s no limit to how long the >old chain gets;

	No theoretical limit. But certainly a very large economic limit as miners not on the majority fork is losing 10k every 10minutes. To ignore this is to ignore economic realities and focus only on theoretical hypothetical situations.

	>transactions on the old chain can easily get 6+ confirmations even though they’re considered invalid by the majority of hashing power.

	6 confirmations on a losing minority fork of 25% (in reality it will be a lot less) will take 4hours, instead of the normal 1h. You (wallet operator) would _certainly_ notice something is wrong.

	>This is a serious problem! Currently most (all?) SPV wallets don’t even check the block version,

	In addition a network wide alert would be sent to all nodes notifying you of the impeding hard fork (with grace period) signalling your need to upgrade. You would really have to try hard to ignore everything, in which case, assuming the ones who do, may only number around the same 5% as in Soft Forks. (and your 6 confirms would take loooong...6 confirmations would be 20hours!!!) and that means its costing you even more money, and realistically no one would be silly enough to keep this fork going.