Hardforks are an issue for the community, the miners and the investors for most blockchains. Usually hardforks leave people with two blockchains and divide the users.

The only positive side of hardforks that divide the chain is probably the free tokens you get. Like when Hive forked from Steem and people could decide which one to sell, because they had the same balance on both.

Hive devs and community found a clever way to deal with the contradiction of upgrading the chain without dividing the people. We basically expect the blockchain to fork at least once a year, and when it happens the whole community and the witnesses unanimously move to the new chain.

We are right now at the HF25 and going to the 26th next year. The next one will be focused on performance and I take it that we can assume it will be another easy and seamless hardfork, the community won’t even notice negative side effects. The last one had an issue that allowed bots to “steal” rewards for the first 7 days (by voting right before the payout), but it was a minor inconvenience that fixed itself, the community also got together to “steal what the bots have stolen” (by voting in mass to make the bots useless).

The lessons were learned in the past hardforks and I expect the experience to only get better for the end user. The hardforks are one of the many advantages of Hive against other blockchains, and something for us to be proud of!