Re: Estranged Core Developer Gavin Andresen Finally Makes Sensible 2MB BIP Proposal!
However, when you have the major hash power supporting an upgrade, then the miners of the minority chain in a hard fork can not mine without suffering huge loss on the mining income (too slow mining), similar to the minority miners in a soft fork suffering huge loss when all the mined blocks are orphaned.So hash power will give up the minority chain quickly thus basically achieve the same result: After a few days, no one would be able to extend that old chain in any meaningful time. This has happened on that "50 bitcoin forever" fork during the first reward halving
This, of course, assumes that nodes reconcile and agree upon a single, valid ledger. Even if a majority of hashing power supports Hard Fork A and a minority supports the Original Fork, the relative hashing power of the minority increases by the amount of hashing power that is mining Hard Fork A, since they are building on separate blockchains. For example:
Pre-fork:
Minority = 30% hashing power Majority = 70% hashing power
Post-fork:
30% minority = 3.333x relative hashing power (Original Fork) 70% majority = 1.429x relative hashing power (Hard Fork A)
In a hard fork situation where there is a significant disparity between the proportion of nodes enforcing different rule sets, it becomes a game of speculation for miners to choose to increase their relative hashing power and by a factor of how much? And the only way to choose is to judge -- based on node proportion -- which blockchain is likely to store value against their mining expenditure?
It's gonna be fun to watch -- I'll tell ya that.
I guess the minority chain will be end very quick, if they dare to setup an exchange, they will face a sell off of pre-fork coins counted in millions of bitcoin, the price of that coin will be crash to 0 in a couple of minutes. In fact I guess no exchange dare to setup an exchange for a minority chain coin. The incentive to mine the minority chain will almost be 0