Kai Li

Kai Li

Assistant Professor at Stevens Institute of Technology

Blockchain hard forks and soft forks

less than 1 minute read

Published:

I found a good elaboration on blockchain forks from Coindesk, that passage illustrates how Blockchain hard/soft forks were created, and what the potential consequnences these forks may bring.

Hard forks:

  • Hard forks are created by the changes of the protocol such as block size, difficulty.

  • In hard forks, the new version blocks will not accepted by the old version nodes.

  • Hard forks can lead to double-spending transaction in the sense that an UTXO that has been spent on the new-chain can be spent again in the old-chain.

Soft forks:

  • Soft forks are created by the changes of protocol in a way that does not affect the structure. (e.g., tighten the rules, add cosmetic functions)

  • In soft forks, the new version blocks will be accepted by the old version nodes.

  • New version blocks will be seen and accepted by both new version nodes and old version nodes, so the new version blocks will eventually dominate the the longest chain.

Reference:

Check out [Hard Fork vs Soft Fork] for the details.

Hash Time Lock Contract (HTLC)

2 minute read

Published:

Hash Time Lock Contract (HTLC)

First proposed by Lighting Network, this contract allows two participants (e.g., Alice and Bob) to swap their tokens without trusting each other. It can be instantiated by the following script:

IF
  <BKey> CHECKSIGVERIFY
  HASH160 <H> EQUAL
ELSE
  <AKey> CHECKSIGVERIFY
  <ATime> CHECKLOCKTIMEVERIFY
ENDIF

TLS Handshakes

less than 1 minute read

Published:

I found a good elaboration on TLS workflows, it explains how TLS Handshake happens and how the two parties interact with each other.

Hello World

1 minute read

Published:

The very first blog on my personal website! In the future, I will use this blog section to share findings during my life, please stay tuned!