It was hard to grasp for me until the whole segwit2x mess. Then I understood that hardforks are a feature, not a bug. It is good that a minority can split off and have their fork. We may see that happen once more in September this year.
I've spent a lot of time talking to people that tried to solve "the hardfork bug" over the years. I think that the best example must have been Terra, which was running a consensus protocol that made chain splits "impossible". The result was corruption: 14 "miners" decided the faith of that chain in a closed meeting. It died. All of it. But with Bitcoin we can always choose to not consent to a change (or not consent with the status quo) and that is actually a very interesting feature. Imagine that we'd still be having fights about block size.
It was hard to grasp for me until the whole segwit2x mess. Then I understood that hardforks are a feature, not a bug. It is good that a minority can split off and have their fork. We may see that happen once more in September this year.
I've spent a lot of time talking to people that tried to solve "the hardfork bug" over the years. I think that the best example must have been Terra, which was running a consensus protocol that made chain splits "impossible". The result was corruption: 14 "miners" decided the faith of that chain in a closed meeting. It died. All of it. But with Bitcoin we can always choose to not consent to a change (or not consent with the status quo) and that is actually a very interesting feature. Imagine that we'd still be having fights about block size.