Presenting A History of Bitcoin Hard Forks – Part 1

What Happened To Bitcoin? 

This comes as an essential discussion on the hard forks of the Bitcoin cryptocurrency. It is sure to enchant you as there is a lot of investigation going around the credibility and reliability of the cryptocurrency world. It is surely something that the tech world is closely watching as the result of a few coin mining by anonymous persons. As the nature of mining remains secure and secretive, many reasons help you get into the world of mining. To own a mining rig and reap benefits is the order of the day now. 

Here it’s important to note that in early 2009, a mysterious cryptocurrency developer was working under the alias Satoshi Nakamoto releasing the first software program implementing the digital currency Bitcoin whereby since then Bitcoin has gone on to not only gain massive appeal across the globe but a lot to inspire hundreds of other digital currencies. 

Thereby many of these cryptocurrencies have made use of aspects that were already inherent in Satoshi’s initial program and concept while others take the Bitcoin model and adapt or attempt to improve upon it. There are in some cases Bitcoin that has spawned variations based on the same underlying concept and program that are distinct from the original. Whereas for these situations, the Bitcoin blockchain has undergone a process known as forking through which the blockchain itself is divided into two distinct entities. 

The truth is that through this forking process there are various digital currencies with names similar to Bitcoin coming to be Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin Gold, and others as for the casual cryptocurrency investor, it can be difficult to tell the difference between these cryptocurrencies and to map the various forks on to a timeline. To get all the details we’ll walk through many of the most important forks about the Bitcoin blockchain over the past several years. 

Genesis Block

Shortly after releasing Bitcoin, in 2009 Satoshi mined the first block on the Bitcoin blockchain as coming to be referred to as the genesis block represented the founding of the cryptocurrency as we know it as able to make numerous changes to the Bitcoin network early on in this process as it has become increasingly difficult and bitcoin’s ‘user base has grown by a tremendous margin. This is the fact that no one person or group can determine when and how Bitcoin should be upgraded has similarly made the process of updating the system more complex. Thereby in the years following the Genesis block, there have been several hard forks. 

It is to be noted that during a hard fork, software implementing Bitcoin and its mining procedures is upgraded whereas once a user upgrades his or her software, that version rejects all transactions from older software effectively creating a new branch of the blockchain and however those users who retain the old software continuing to process transactions meaning that here is a parallel set of transactions taking place across two different chains. 

Bitcoin XT

The next is one more popular Bitcoin XT as one of the first notable hard forks of Bitcoin, as the software was launched by Mike Hearn in late 2014 to include several new features he has proposed. This is how the previous version of Bitcoin allowed up to seven transactions per second, also Bitcoin XT aimed for 24 transactions per second. Thereby to accomplish this, it proposed increasing the block size from one megabyte to 8 megabytes. 

Initially, as Bitcoin XT saw success, with more than 1000 nodes running its software however by just a few months later the project lost user interest and was essentially left for dead. Thereby Bitcoin XT is technically still available that it is generally seen to have fallen out of favor. 

Bitcoin Classic

As it declined, some community members still wanted block sizes to increase were in response, a group of developers launched Bitcoin Classic whereas unlike XT, the proposed increasing the block size to 8 megabytes. Classic intended to increase it to only 2 megabytes. Similar to Bitcoin XT, Bitcoin Classic saw initial interest with about 2000 nodes for several months. The project still now exists with some developers strongly supporting Bitcoin classic and nonetheless, the larger cryptocurrency community seems to have generally moved on to other options. 

Signing Off With A Few Words

The discussion does not end here. There are many more hard forks that are discussed in the following post. The truth is that there has never been an even popular currency that has undergone hard forks as the Bitcoin has.