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Comment by sp821543 | Hacker News Reader

How many times has bitcoin hard-forked because of the protocol being compromised? How much daily volume is it currently supporting? How does the velocity of the codebase compare to other coins?

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>How many times has bitcoin hard-forked because of the protocol being compromised?

Looks like there were some. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15907735

>How much daily volume is it currently supporting?

Doesn't matter. Any other coin can support the same daily volume (and many others usually do)

>How does the velocity of the codebase compare to other coins?

Terrible. Constant in-fighting. This is what is hurting bitcoin right now.

Edit: added hard forks link.

>Terrible. Constant in-fighting. This is what is hurting bitcoin right now.

Anyone who's paying attention to the bitcoin repo can see your statement has no basis in reality. For instance, compare the number of closed pull requests between btc/eth/ltc...and bch if you want a good laugh.

Litecoin actually did last night, more volume than Bitcoin, the fees were almost nothing! I actually did send an LTC transaction last night, so much fun not to be stupid and take advantage of this revolution instead of just sitting around like a troll calling it a bubble :D

https://coinmarketcap.com/exchanges/gdax/

Hard-forked? Never. But you don't need to hard-fork to secure the network. Bitcoin HAS soft-forked several times to close of critical zero-day vulnerabilities, although to be fair this was in the early days of the network. (There was multiple ways in which any random participant could spend anyone's funds in the early days. They were all honorably disclosed and fixed without being exploited.)

There was an unintentional fork on August 15, 2010, when "[an] attacker exploited [an] integer overflow bug that permitted an attacker to create several billion bitcoins". [source][0]

There was an unintentional fork on March 12, 2013 caused by previously disallowed number of tx inputs (?) as resolved by [BIP50][1].

[0]: https://blog.blockchain.com/2016/02/26/a-brief-history-of-bi... [1]: https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0050.mediawi...

The first one was reorg'd out of the chain. It was a soft-fork, just deployed in response to something rather than in anticipation.

Likewise in the second case, where there was a temporary soft-fork put in place to limit the block size so as to not run afoul of the bug, which itself wasn't a hard-fork or a soft-fork but rather a probabilistic failure to achieve consensus under transient circumstances.

>Hard-forked? Never. But you don't need to hard-fork to secure the network.

I think the point was about vulnerability + hard-fork due to disagreement a la Ethereum Classic

> How much daily volume is it currently supporting?

(for varying degrees of support where without a transaction fee of ~$5-20, your transaction may be silently dropped, and even without may require multiple hours for confirmation)

>your transaction may be silently dropped, and even without may require multiple hours for confirmation

specifically, after 72 hours if it's not confirmed. but your wallet will continually rebroadcast the transaction, so it's not a hard limit.

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