This is when a policy or fundamental laws of a blockchain are altered. Whenever a fork occurs the blockchain inquestion will divide into two, nevertheless, each of the new chain will still contain the same information as the parent chain. However, the child chain will now possess a new direction which is unlike the parent chain.
Hard Fork Explained
This when policies of a blockchain are altered to a great extent, such that transactions and informations on the parent chain has become invalid to this new chain. A occurrence of an hard fork every nodes in the blockchain, must now make use of the latest software policy. Hard fork are usually done when both developers and end user are no longer satisfied with the features and function of the particular blockchain under consideration. Also, hard forks are done when there is need to source for funds from the general public to finance new techs or project.
Basically a new blockchain that arises as a result of a hard fork has a different direction, from the parent blockchain. Inputing new rules into the code of a blockchain will produce a fork. Also, a part of the fork will maintain the same direction as the parent chain, while the other won’t. A hard fork allows users to find the latest chain and switch to it.
Soft Fork Explained
This type of fork involves change the rules of a blockchain in a way that just the recently valid transactions will become invalid. This can also be referred to as a backward compatible because older nodes will still to function hand in hand with the new nodes. Larger percentage of mines on this chain will required to switch to impose the new law. This, however, is different from the hard fork in which all nodes must switch to reach a general agreement on the new chain.
Furthermore, new transaction type can also be added as soft fork, and this only cals for participants and miners to have full knowledge of this new transaction type. Additionally, soft fork also occurs due to little transient divergence in a chain at a time when miners on adjacent chain breaches a new consensus rule, which their node is unaware of.
If a user switches to an after-soft fork client, and maybe due to one particular reason larger number of miners now switches to the before fork client the after-fork will eventually breach the consensus, the instant a new block that does not align with the latest law comes in. For a soft fork to work, large chunk of the mining capacity will have to operate on a client-known fork. Consequently, the security of the after-fork increases as the figure of the miners receiving the new law increases.
Teach yourself technical analysis: Technical Analysis