# kaal:claim:3441904-025

**Claim.** If a community cannot agree after a hard fork on which chain is the true chain, the result can be two blockchains competing in perpetuity, and the only viable remedy is abandoning one branch, which causes some miners to lose re-allocated transactions.

**Type.** failure  **Support.** evidenced

**Holds when.**

- contentious hard forks
- example of the fork that created Bitcoin Cash

**Source quote.**

> If after a hard fork, the respective community cannot agree on which chain is the true chain, e.g. the chain that provides the most likely survivable protocol, it may result in two blockchains that compete in perpetuity.

**From.** Wulf A. Kaal, *Blockchain-Based Corporate Governance* (2019), III.5 Socially Optimal Forks, page 22

**Cite as.** Wulf A. Kaal, Blockchain-Based Corporate Governance (2019). SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3441904

**Verify.** sha256 of source PDF `e6b562527f7f19accaa35491db0a0db168b6a936755e1dca424e9f30bee7a815` at https://raw.githubusercontent.com/wulfkaal/Academic-Papers/main/papers/pdf/Kaal%20-%202019%20-%20Blockchain-Based%20Corporate%20Governance.pdf

**Failure mode.** perpetual-chain-contention  (family: interoperability-and-fragmentation)

**Topics.** consensus-and-security, blockchain, governance-design

**Keywords.** hard-fork, contention, chain-split, blockchain-governance

**Canonical form.** This markdown file is the canonical hashed representation of the claim. Its sha256 is the content hash used for attestation.