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Curious about forks on the blockchain?
Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin Gold, Bitcoin XT, Bitcoin Classic; why are there so many cryptos with the name bitcoin? Bitcoin’s design is public with an open-source code that anybody can take part in. No one owns or controls it. Its huge community has made changes to the original currency resulting in different versions of the same coin. These versions are known as forks.
Picture the common tool used for eating — the fork. It has one handle where you place your hand, but this handle goes ahead to split into four or three other separate entities that we use to pick up our food. This is the same way forks in the blockchain are. A project on the blockchain will start as one and then split later on because of disagreements within its community.
Let’s take a common example; Bitcoin. New bitcoins are created by many participants in the community known as miners. They verify transactions and add them as blocks to the blockchain. They keep the network secure and ensure you can’t double-spend the coins.
However, these communities of miners and developers will not always agree with each other on the way forward. One group may insist on a particular change in the way things are run while the rest of the group will disagree. When they can’t come to a consensus, this group may decide to go…
