Blockchain Development with Hyperledger
by Salman A. Baset, Luc Desrosiers, Nitin Gaur, Petr Novotny
Forking
A Bitcoin blockchain can diverge into two potential paths since miners do not necessarily collect transactions and contract block candidates in the same way, nor at the same time. Other reasons such as hacking or software upgrades can also lead to path divergence. The splitting patches are called forks. There are temporary forks and permanent forks.
If a permanent fork occurs due to, for example, malicious attacks, a hard fork occurs. Similarly, there is the concept of soft fork. Both hard fork and soft fork refer to a radical change to the protocol. Hard fork makes previously invalid blocks/transactions valid and a soft fork makes previously valid blocks/transactions invalid.
To remove a temporary fork, Bitcoin protocol dictates ...
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Read now
Unlock full access