What is 'FORK'; Its uniqueness in the cryptocurrency world.

[Cryptomultiplier]

A hard fork refers to a radical change to the protocol of a blockchain network that effectively results in two branches, one that follows the previous protocol and one that follows the new version.
In a hard fork, holders of tokens in the original blockchain will be granted tokens in the new fork as well, but miners must choose which blockchain to continue verifying.
A hard fork can occur in any blockchain, and not only Bitcoin (where hard forks have created Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin SV, among several others, for example).

Reasons For a Hard Fork?
There are a number of reasons why developers may implement a hard fork, such as correcting important security risks found in older versions of the software, to add new functionality, or to reverse transactions—such as when the Ethereum blockchain created a hard fork to reverse the hack on the Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO).

After the hack, the Ethereum community almost unanimously voted in favor of a hard fork to roll back transactions that siphoned off tens of millions of dollars worth of digital currency by an anonymous hacker. The hard fork also helped DAO token holders get their ether (ETH) funds returned.

The proposal for a hard fork did not exactly unwind the network’s transaction history. Rather, it relocated the funds tied to the DAO to a newly created smart contract with the single purpose of letting the original owners withdraw their funds.

How Forks Work
A fork in a blockchain can occur in any crypto-technology platform—not only Bitcoin. That is because blockchains and cryptocurrency work in basically the same way no matter which crypto platform they're on. You may think of the blocks in blockchains as cryptographic keys that move memory. Because the miners in a blockchain set the rules that move the memory in the network, these miners understand the new rules.
However, all of the miners need to agree about the new rules and about what comprises a valid block in the chain. So when you want to change those rules you need to "fork it"—like a fork in a road—to indicate that there's been a change in or a diversion to the protocol. The developers can then update all of the software to reflect the new rules.

This forking process that I have brought to your awareness is what has lead to that various digital currencies with names similar to bitcoin, which have come to be. Examples include the bitcoin cash, bitcoin gold, and others.
As a newbie willing to invest in cryptocurrency, it is quite difficult to tell the difference between these cryptocurrencies and to be able to distinguish the various forks on a timeline. It is therefore essential to  do research on the history of the most important bitcoin hard forks of the past several years, unless one has a broker of course.  Otherwise it would be a waste of time and money to invest in the wrong digital currency.


https://www.investopedia.com/terms/h/hard-fork.asp

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[BitDane]

A cryptocurrency fork is not limited to only hardfork, there is also called soft fork and it is mostly used to upgrade the existing blockchain.  So we can say that there are two types of forks done on the blockchain and this article[1] can tell us more about it.

The reason why developers implement forks are the following:

• Security Fixes
• Efficiency changes
• New features
• Reversing transactions

Explanation can be find here[2].

This image from the article shows the difference between hard fork and soft fork.



There are cases where a soft fork can lead to a hardfork and one famous example is the implementation of segwit as a soft fork which transformed to a hardfork and led to the launch of a new cryptocurrency  - Bitcoin Cash.

Another example of soft fork is the implementation of taproot.

We can read more information about soft fork here[2]

[1] https://changelly.com/blog/hard-soft-forks-explained
[2] https://originstamp.com/blog/what-is-a-soft-fork-with-examples/

[dzungmobile]

Forked coins with less support from community and developers are mostly dead ones with time and history says that. The successful fork is the one that has majority support from developers and community.

How many Bitcoin forks are there?

Many scam altcoins tried to use fork term to mislead investors and steal investor money.

[Zaguru12]

Forked coins with less support from community and developers are mostly dead ones with time and history says that. The successful fork is the one that has majority support from developers and community.

How many Bitcoin forks are there?

Many scam altcoins tried to use fork term to mislead investors and steal investor money.

The only forks that had a consensus maybe up to today are some of the soft forks, like SEGWIT improvements. As for hard forks they either ended not improving or solving the problem they were created for or end up been another dead coins like the Alticoins. The most popular ones are the bitcoin cash, bitcoin gold and bitcoin diamond. Most of these fork’s poses vulnerabilities and that is why the number of its users are not increasing till date. Bitcoin cash could couldn’t solve the problem of increasing the block size because it wouldn’t not be so secure as bitcoin itself and this also lead to its own forking. As for bitcoin gold trying to make mining easier it was/is been tipped to be faced by a 51% attack. The bitcoin diamond looking to increase the transaction speed and thereby increasing the supply will only by 10times the total supply of bitcoin will only make it look like those Altcoins with large supply. Bitcoin supply limit at 21 million is the reason it is cherished today. So most of the hard forks ended up not solving the problems they were created for.

[Cryptomultiplier]

A cryptocurrency fork is not limited to only hardfork, there is also called soft fork and it is mostly used to upgrade the existing blockchain.  So we can say that there are two types of forks done on the blockchain and this article[1] can tell us more about it.

The reason why developers implement forks are the following:

• Security Fixes
• Efficiency changes
• New features
• Reversing transactions

Explanation can be find here[2].

This image from the article shows the difference between hard fork and soft fork.



There are cases where a soft fork can lead to a hardfork and one famous example is the implementation of segwit as a soft fork which transformed to a hardfork and led to the launch of a new cryptocurrency  - Bitcoin Cash.

Another example of soft fork is the implementation of taproot.

We can read more information about soft fork here[2]

[1] https://changelly.com/blog/hard-soft-forks-explained
[2] https://originstamp.com/blog/what-is-a-soft-fork-with-examples/

I appreciate your inclusion and you sincerely helped expansiate on the simple word I started, which is, 'FORK'.

 I felt with all the recent happenings  as includes congestion in network, high fees. One of the strategies that might likely be applied inorder to prevent a crash, is for developers and miners to agree to initiate a FORK in the system.
This is one of the ways at worst that could happen to users coins who invested in Bitcoin, right now.  No need for fear of loss of the coins you invested or intend to invest.

[Yamane_Keto]

I strongly recommend to stop using references such as changelly for those who want to search for the correct technical information, their articles are either biased or have a technical background that is not relevant, so they may contain some errors, the same applies to investopedia although they are good in economic information.

Bitcoin hardfork only happened to fix errors like what happened in 2 TIMEs (CVE-2010-5139 https://www.cvedetails.com/cve/CVE-2010-5139/ and CVE-2013-322 https://www.cvedetails. .com/cve/CVE-2013-3220/ )

In 2013 and the chain forked into two. down time was about for 6 hours and 20 minutes.
As for all subsequent hardforks, they produced currencies that are completely different from Bitcoin, and many of them are either dead or have lost value.

Sometime softfork is better than hardfork:

BitcoinCash hardfork of bitcoin, 32 MB block size too many empty blocks.
Bitcoin Segwit softfork, 1 MB block size but size of the block is 4M weight units full block, and still maintain a 1MB size.

[Z390]

There used to be interesting Fork coins in crypto space and the community liked those projects, e.g Bitcoin Gold, until the team decided to less active and nothing interesting is happening with the project anymore,  Bitcoin Cash followed in the same way too and now investors are abandoning the projects, the truth about fork coins is they are only good for short term investment only, if they are still brand new, in the next bear market such coins will be massively rejected.

Go into some good research, upon all the new features and speed that those fork coins brings they are never successful for long, fork coins are good example of projects that I can never advice anyone to invest their money into.

[BitDane]

I appreciate your inclusion and you sincerely helped expansiate on the simple word I started, which is, 'FORK'.

Fork isn't hardfork alone so we need to include softfork as another type of Forks.  Thismay possibly avoid future misunderstanding about Forks.

I felt with all the recent happenings  as includes congestion in network, high fees. One of the strategies that might likely be applied inorder to prevent a crash, is for developers and miners to agree to initiate a FORK in the system.
This is one of the ways at worst that could happen to users coins who invested in Bitcoin, right now.  No need for fear of loss of the coins you invested or intend to invest.

I agree that the current event about network congestion  is the sign that the Bitcoin Network needs an improvement.  Bitcoin does not necessarily need to do a hardfork in order to solve the problem, I believe it just need some softfork to implement upgrades and updates.  It may cause a split if there is enough numbers of miners opposing the said soft fork just like what happen during the segwit upgrade.

I strongly recommend to stop using references such as changelly for those who want to search for the correct technical information, their articles are either biased or have a technical background that is not relevant, so they may contain some errors, the same applies to investopedia although they are good in economic information.

Noted but in curiosity, can you find errors on the article linked using Changelly as reference?  You advice pique my curiosity so I wanted to know which terms on that article is misleading.

Sometime softfork is better than hardfork:

I think there is both pros and cons of these two forks and I believe hardforks is done when there is nothing else to do to preserve the network (the last resort) due to attack, bugs or glitches discovered on the chain.