Bitcoin Forum

What is the forks of bitcoin and why they occur? ???

Bitcoin block size 1M, each block is now approximately close to this size, has reached the upper limit of the block capacity. If Bitcoin network transfers more and more, many transactions will not be packaged and confirmed in the first block after the transaction occurs, and may need to wait several blocks or even longer. Congestion on bitcoin transactions has led to slower transfers and higher fees.

Forks are some alternatives, to make transactions faster, but I have question, whether they really help?

It is interesting, if the forks are as trustworthy as bitcoin?

Depends what you mean by this. In general they're nothing but moneygrabs, and won't be surviving very long because there is simply no reason for anyone to actually use them for anything.

fork (depending on the context) can mean 2 different things:

1. simply an upgrade.
for example when P2SH (multi signature features) were added to bitcoin, it was a soft "fork" for bitcoin that happened years ago. so was Segregated Witness upgrade which happened last year. there are also hard forks, there was at least 1 hard "fork" for bitcoin near the early years fixing a bug.
these "forks of bitcoin" will improve bitcoin itself. and they need the whole network to accept them in order for them to happen. and if the majority doesn't accept it, the "fork" needs to change or be dropped.

why do these happen? to improve bitcoin, fix a possible bug,...

2. copying code.
in programming when you copy the code and make changes to it and create a new thing it is called a "fork" you can see the term on github which is a basically code sharing platform and you "fork" a project when you want to copy it and create your own thing.
these "forks of bitcoin" are those forks that create a new coin which is also called an altcoin. examples are Litecoin, Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin gold, and about 700 others.

why do these happen? to create a new coin and explorer new possibilities and in most cases to use the name of "bitcoin" and gain some money from creating the new coin. like free advertisement.

Because Bitcoin is open source software, anyone is free to modify it and create new coin, or fork if it shares Bitcoin ledger up to fork time. But you need community for the fork to being actually used and traded, which is the toughest part.

What i need do for create own fork? Can anybody create the bitcoin fork?

There are two types of forks, which one are you referring? there are soft and hard fork. Soft forks are just an upgrade in software protocol which is a backward compatible with older nodes, meaning old nodes and new nodes transactions recognize each other, example for this is Segwit (not segwit2x). While hard forks are happening when core developers refuse the proposed upgrade, which will result of creating new cryptocurrency with Bitcoin on its name and unlike soft fork, hard forks are not backward compatible to older nodes because hard forks create their own blockchain and coin (separate to original network). Example of this is Bitcoin Cash.

You can find all relevant forks here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2749969.msg28085773#msg28085773 , make sure to read Scam Advisory there


As bitcoin is open source anybody can create their own fork, thing is maintaining the code and nodes in the network. Since the debate around block sizes and transaction many new forks began to appear. I mean it is somewhat good way to lunch you own coin since you give people who held BTC you give them equivalent, or not equivalent amount in total proportional to how much btc they had which could boost up adoption. Many forks are "unsuccessful" at least till now simple because its hard to maintain it and be the number one.

Bitcoin code is open source, you can find it on github and you are free to fork it, grab some snapshot of current block etc. But you will still need to have some devs if you yourself are unable to code. It is not an easy job and an easy thing to do as you may think it is so easy. You can even look at charts and see that forks are usually dumped when they appear on the market.