One of the most intriguing developments in the bitcoin industry is the growing trend of forking. With this practice, individuals can inherit the technology of the original bitcoin implementation (bitcoin core) and introduce new technical specifications and parameters running on an entirely new software ecosystem. Already, many new “versions” of bitcoin have been created by forking the original source code. Many of these new implementations have targeted increased payment scalability and additional software use cases (such as the addition of a turing-complete scripting language). In this course, we will guide the student on how to initiate a hard fork of the original bitcoin core implementation in order to create their own adjacent (and completing) blockchain.
Tutorial: How To Fork BitcoinThis course is of particular interest to individuals:
- creating their own cryptocurrency for investment and profitability potential
- bringing new use cases for bitcoin and cryptocurrency to market
- proposing methods to sustainably scale the bitcoin payment network
In this course, we will complete a “bare essential” hard fork of bitcoin core – meaning that we will target an upcoming block on the network timeline and create a parallel network with little or no new modifications to the source code.
After we have familiarized ourselves with this procedure, we will attempt more advanced implementations such as:
- alternative scaling methods (increasing the average block size and block data limit)
- introducing a turing-complete scripting language to the blockchain platform (Solidity/JavaScript) for programmable applications
- Examining and enabling previously disabled opt-codes (done for security purposes in the early stages of development)
Please note that this area of bitcoin research and blockchain development is at the cutting edge of industry. Therefore, we advise leaving room for making mistakes and also ask the student to understand that there will be many modifications to the course instructions contained within. Many courses available today in the bitcoin and blockchain industries target the programming of bitcoin but fail to deliver on how and why a developer may wish to experiment with these new internet protocols.
In this tutorial on
How To Fork Bitcoin, we will show the user not only how to create and run their own parallel network, but why we believe forking the existing software repository of bitcoin will be one of the prime opportunities for bringing new applications to market.
