[ad_1]
Welcome to Hard Fork Basics, a collection of tips, tricks, guides and tips for updating you in the world of cryptocurrency and blockchain.
Cryptocurrency forks are as inevitable as death and taxes. You may have seen the recent news describing the controversial Bitcoin Cash fork in detail, and you're wondering what a fork really is.
While every rigid fork has its own nuances and complexities, under all this it is a fairly concrete principle for what is a rigid fork and what it should do. This article will try to explain, in the simplest possible way, what a tough fork is.
A reminder on the blockchain
Before diving and starting to talk about hard fork it is useful to remember how blockchains are structured. In other words, a blockchain is a series of cryptocurrency transactions that are verified and ordered chronologically in blocks. These blocks are added by a process called mining.
The transactions of a blockchain will involve a cryptocurrency or a specific token. Of course, each of these has its own set of rules that establishes how to verify transactions, how many can be verified in each block, and so on. These rules must be followed if you want to extract a specific currency and block that blockchain.
But what if you do not like the rules?
Quite simply, if you do not like the rules, you can change them, and by doing so "fork" the existing blockchain.
When you create a difficult fork, you are creating a new blockchain, with new rules that are not compatible with previous versions. As a result, a completely new cryptocurrency will be created.
You might think that your cryptocurrency needs bigger blocks to try and reduce transaction fees. If some developers agree, and some are not, you can take the original blockchain code base, update it to allow larger blocks and launch the update to insert the blockchain. It is therefore up to the community to decide which blockchain to support: the old, or the new "forked", or both.
This is what happened with Bitcoin in August 2017. A group of developers decided that the cryptocurrency needed bigger blocks after the transaction fees for the original Bitcoin were getting out of hand. So they wrote a new protocol, started a new blockchain and with it a new cryptocurrency, Bitcoin Cash.
Basically, when developers instigate a fork, all they are doing is updating, modifying or rewriting the software code that makes a cryptocurrency work.
The hard forks are not the same as the soft forks
You may also have heard of "soft forks". While the soft forks operate on the same premise as the hard forks, there is a fundamental difference. In a soft fork, the resulting software update is backward compatible with previous versions. A new cryptocurrency has not been created on the soft fork and for the most part the business will continue normally.
Now, the next time your favorite currency talks about "forking", I hope you know what they're talking about.
Published November 16th 2018 at 15:31 UTC
[ad_2]Source link
