Quote from: BorisTheSpider on January 25, 2014, 09:43:58 AM

Your coins are safe - nothing drastic will happen, and all your funds will remain valid.

You will not need to update your miner, but the pools will need to update their wallet. You will also need to update your own wallet.

You can update in advance, so you won't have any downtime or anything, and all your coins will still be valid, whether mined before or after the fork.

So the process is:

1. We release a new wallet

2. There is a period between the new wallet release, and the actual fork happening (the new wallet contains _both_ difficulty algorithms, and changes over at a predetermined time (or more accurately, at a predetermined block height).

3. The fork happens without anyone knowing anything happened, except the difficulty adjustment becomes better

The reason for the gap between 1 and 3 (the time period we're asking people to vote on in the poll) is just to allow time for everyone to update so the fork is seemless - if you didn't update, on fork day, your wallet would not sync the blockchain post-fork. It wouldn't drastically break anything - you could still update to the new wallet and everything would start working again with no loss of coins or anything, it would just be disruptive so we want to plan so everything is seamless.

As always, please ensure your wallet is backed up, not just because you're installing an update but because it should _always_ be backed up, preferably in multiple different physical locations.

Maybe Vertcoin should post it on first page with bold font to avoid panic and thousands of such questions? Especially the first part about the safety of coins. Grin