Hello in this lesson we are going to cover what a soft fork is versus a hard for especially with coins such as Bitcoin cash and have Bitcoin gold as well depending on when you're watching it that coin might even be dead because he got D dust pretty much as soon as it came at the website for a dead What are soft forks and what are hard forks if you're into cryptocurrencies and what the probably be hearing these term then you're probably scratching your head and thinking for a while, so essentially a soft fork. You can think of it like a software a software a software upgrade a hard fork You can think of it like it's essentially a whole new branch. So if you were to think of open source software, for example, a soft fork would be implementing the main code into the main branch.

And every user can use it. If they have old versions, then they can still continue using the old version, but they can get the new features as well. Whereas a hard fork would essentially be getting the code that you've got for us in the master version, and actually separating that so any changes that you make to that will not be backwards compatible, because this is a whole nother branch. So let's just cover some more of the differences in depth essentially. Let me draw a grid here. So soft fork and horde fork me and this down quite a bit.

Hopefully that should be enough. And now let's cover essentially what the essence of a soft focus it tightens the rules of how the core foundation should work. So for example, it reduces blocks oil usage. So that's a way of tightening the rules. So the block size isn't actually changed. It's just sort of changing the rules of how you use it.

It is also backwards compatible. And as a result, it is favored by many community members. It is backwards compatible old nodes can accept new blocks. So this aid in the compatibility and another great thing is users and merchants can can tenue run in old versions and still accept new blocks. So this is a very powerful aspect of soft forks, that they the backwards compatible they don't enforce us. As a merchant to upgrade, they can still use the network.

So that's amazing. Because if you have a piece of software, I'm sure you've been in a situation where we have an app, for example, and the forcing you to upgrade, and otherwise you just call you there, or you can't use some of the new features. So that is obviously very annoying. So whereas with a soft fork, this would not happen. Sorry, hard fork, it doesn't actually tie to the rules. It acts bans.

The rules, so for example, instead of reducing the block size, in the case of soft forks, what he would do is increment instead of reducing bluffers usage, instead, you would actually increase the block size. So if the block size was a megabyte, it might increase To 16 megabytes. So this would have implications on older versions as well. So as a result, it is not backwards. compatible. So, that is definitely something that a lot of users do not like old nodes don't accept new blocks.

Nodes that run old versions well say new Transactions as in valid So, the compatibility is non existent in terms of it being backwards compatible, so, which is very, very bad. And as a result, hard forks are very controversial in the Bitcoin community and many believes it goes against the ethos of what Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies in general stand for, because if we have this sore divided, sore network where all we have is deep divided infrastructure of multiple networks, multiple branches, then essentially we don't have any continuity. We don't have this sort of one system, they decentralized and distributed we just have a bunch of system days just a mix, match and mismatch. have just ideas clearly aren't working together. So for that reason, it is very, very controversial within the community. And finally also requires it requires it requires everyone to up.

Great. So that is a nerfing as well. So, yeah, that's it really in terms of knowing more about soft forks and hard forks. Soft forks essentially just constrain the current rules. They just try and get the most out of the network Currently, the backwards compatible the community loves them. Hi.

Fourth community doesn't like it as much. It expands the rules, but it's not backwards compatible. So, think for yourself, which one do you prefer? If you have any questions, feel free to reach out. If there was any sort of topic or any concept covered in this video that you didn't understand, feel free to go for the lesson again. And as usual, thanks for watching, and I look forward to seeing you in the next video.