I'm having trouble wondering why this post was necessary?

“In the future, as the Zcash community grows, there may come a time when we need multiple, distinct technologies, each one building on a different branch of the original blockchain. This is likely to happen…”

It’s like when the Home Land security or DOD puts out a video about having your affairs in order and provisions for you loved ones… I don’t want multiple zcash blockchains(yes I know of zclassic) this just worries me and I had yet to be worried about the direction of zcash. Maybe if it wasn’t so vague to stir up more questions than answers.

3 Likes

Speed of light issues have been discussed regarding interplanetary blockchains before!

3 Likes

Thanks for taking the time to respond. I seized up as soon as I read the word “fork”, even prefaced with the word “friendly”

I love Zcash and it came across at first like she wanted to take a “break” from dating and I thought we was getting married!

2 Likes

interplanetary, not interstellar!

Seriously though, a blockchain even on a moonbase would have to be its own chain with pegged sidechain trades to assets on earth or something similar

4 Likes

the vulcans references let me to believe you were joking, yes!

Good because I would take several bullets for her.

For the record, there was some internal dissention about posting this blog entry, especially with no mention of the disadvantages of a block chain fork, or the need for a long period of discussion and debate in order for any such fork to be considered “friendly”.

My personal view is that block chain forks are to be avoided at almost any cost.

5 Likes

I guess I can’t disagree that a friendly type of fork could exist, especially one preventing failure of imagination or some type of win/win in hindsight… so I’m okay with the suspense.

2 Likes

I totally get that point of view, and am also against blockchain forks unless absolutely needed. I will however say that recently I’ve been having some good interaction with the zclassic folks, and they are contributing some cross-platform work that I’ll be sending back upstream from my zcash fork(s). They paid a bounty for me to adapt zcash for mac to zclassic (it was all of 2 days work including the gui, so pretty tame). They are strongly motivated to not have Mac live in its own branch, and have been working to add all the nasty little #ifdef’s for the per-platform changes needed that I’d been putting off doing.(they even solved the mystery of issue #1800!!!) I’ll be merging them back into my fork of zcash proper and opening a PR with you upstream this week.

So I think that the zclassic fork of zcash is perhaps the most friendly blockchain fork I’ve seen so far, which speaks well of this community.

4 Likes

I guess we cannot know the motivation behind an author’s post, but at the end of the day, technologies evolve, and it’s a problem to rely on a blockchain that cannot. So some preemptive planning should be done to deal with the problem.

1 Like

Now that I think of it more. A better solution is simply to develop a way to agree on token ownership across two blockchains simultaneously. Solve that problem and you have achieved extensibility. You would want to embed that functionality in as soon as possible so people couldn’t send invalidated tokens on the legacy blockchain to unsuspecting recipients.

Zclassic is a bit different, though, because there’s no shared history of transactions, so the ZCL currency has always been separate from ZEC, even though we share code.

I was also interested to see their Zen announcement which they call a harmonious split. I wish them luck on their own ‘friendly fork’.

1 Like

true, and I may pick up a bit of ZCL before then just for shits and grins, as all ZCL holders will have the same amount of ZEN when they split, and ZEN is going to have a scheme where full node operators will get part of the block rewards, which is the aspect of it that most interests me, @nathan-at-least