How hard is it to fork bitcoin?

[DrBitcoin]

I am not a programmer, but it seems that Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin Gold have proven that there is big money in forking bitcoin.

How hard is this process? And just like the millions of shitty ICOs that came out, what’s to stop hundreds of people from making their own forked version of Bitcoin? Seems very profitable and where there is money to be made there are people capitalizing.

[Rosewater Foundation]

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=563972.0
relevant

[pooya87]

creating the fork is not that hard, for example you can change any of the consensus rules and have yourself a new fork of bitcoin. the hard part is making it relevant so that people pay some attention to it and then make money. and also to be able to keep it alive.
just forking will not make you any money.

for example bitcoin cash was created by the miners so that they can make more money. when they pump it and switch to mining BCH they can mine 100 blocks more than normal and make a lot more money. that is why it is still around.

bitcoin gold was created to change the PoW and make bitcoin mineable by GPU again. that is why it got some attention but they ruined it by adding a 200,000 premined coins to it.

and this process is not as easy as creating a shitty ICO. for that you do a lot less work because the platforms for ICOs are created for this exact purpose but forking bitcoin is a much harder process in comparison because of the complexity of the code and things such as replay protection which you have to worry about and also the difficulty which will make it impossible to mine. and if you lower it, you will risk 51% attacks to wipe out your fork.