A History of Bitcoin Forks: Top 5 Bitcoin Forks, Rated and Reviewed

The idea Creighton had was to combine the privacy and secrecy of ZClassic with the security and popularity of Bitcoin. Interestingly, Bitcoin Gold also uses Proof-of-Work (just like Bitcoin), but it has been modified to only allow GPU’s to mine, not ASIC’s. In response, Bitcoin Gold installed a new mining process that makes sure that specialized and expensive hardware cannot be used to increase somebody’s chances of winning the mining reward. Interestingly, anybody that was holding BTC  on the day of the Bitcoin split received exactly the same amount of Bitcoin Cash (BCH) coins.

A History of Bitcoin Hard Forks

Sign up to get instant access to our Blockchain Believers portfolio, with our top-rated crypto pick. Along with that, there has also been confusion about the various types of forks, how they get activated and the risks they pose. The team at CryptoVantage.com only recommends products and services that we would use ourselves and that we believe will provide value to our readers. We advocate for you to do your own research and make educated financial decisions.

A Complete History of Bitcoin Forks

Created by Charlie Lee, the largest differences are a more lightweight algorithm (scrypt instead of SHA-256), faster block times (2.5 minutes) and higher number of total coins (84m). Litecoin was also the first to implement protocol changes designed to help scale bitcoin, Segregated Witness and Lightning Network. In a hard fork event, participants are faced with a choice—they can update their software to the new version or not upgrade their software and use the old (and now unmaintained) blockchain.

Storm in the crypto market: Gemini’s stablecoin GUSD loses over 90% of its market capitalization.

Past examples of successful soft forks include software upgrades like BIP 66 (which dealt with signature validation) and P2SH (which altered bitcoin’s address formatting). The new chain was supported by the Ethereum foundation and titled Ethereum, while the old chain where the DAO hack is still present, is called Ethereum Classic, and is still supported as the “original” Ethereum. In its simplest form, it is when somebody creates a copy of the Bitcoin blockchain code and makes changes to it. These changes can be made for a number of reasons, such as the previous blockchain being hacked, or because improvements need to be made.

• In these situations, the community (i.e., bitcoin holders) can vote to execute a fork that splits the Bitcoin blockchain into 2 separate blockchains.
• Nonetheless, the community seems to have generally moved on to other options as it is no longer maintained.
• Ver and Wright were both known as strong supporters of digital currencies, but they were unable to reach an agreement about how to proceed.
• A hard fork is a software upgrade that introduces a new rule to the network that isn’t compatible with the older software.
• However, the transaction speed was made to be a lot faster than Bitcoin with 2.5 minutes, unlike Bitcoin’s 10 minutes.
• The changes that a team of developers wanted to make was to increase the maximum block size from 1MB to 8MB.

The fork rolled 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. However, some miners kept mining the old chain, which was picked up by OTC desks and given a price discovery order book. Poloniex listed this currency also, and some of the Ethereum community decided to keep this version and created Ethereum Classic.

Bitcoin Classic (

The changes that a team of developers wanted to make was to increase the maximum block size from 1MB to 8MB. This would allow miners to add more transactions into a block, which would have reduced the fees that Bitcoin users pay to transfer funds. As both sides were unable to agree on a path, bitcoin hard fork on August 1st, 2017, for the first time ever, the BTC blockchain hard-forked into two separate blockchains. The new blockchain was called Bitcoin Cash, or BCH, with a block size cap of 8MB. So does a holder of the original cryptocurrency doubles their money when a crypto hard forks?

• They typically stem from either a disagreement between 2 schools of thought, or as a defense against a hack.
• The crew behind Bitcoin Cash could decide at the last minute to abandon its plan.
• This is how several blockchains and cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin Cash and Ethereum Classic, started.
• That said, many users believe that KuCoin is one of the simpler exchanges on the current market.
• Since Bitcoin Cash was created, more and more hard forks have come around.

• They will always be trading off of the original Bitcoin name, which lots of people don’t like.
• This occurred after a group of developers identified as Team Evey and Team 007 felt dissatisfied with Bitcoin’s operation, mostly on the ground of its block size.
• It has suffered repeated DDOS attacks, and even the infamous 51% attack where a malicious miner took over 51% of the network in 2018 and began rearranging the blockchain at their discretion (largely minting coins).
• An interim constitution will also be established, supported by a technical guardrail script.
• With the Chang upgrade now live, ADA token holders will be able to shape Cardano’s future by electing governance representatives and voting on development proposals.
• A fork can be started by the developers of the blockchain or by community members.

It carried on the back of Mike Hearn’s work in 2014, proposing to support BIP 91 in order to increase the block limit to 8 MB, and then steadily to a new 32 MB cap. While some of the top cryptocurrency exchanges are, indeed, based in the United States (i.e. KuCoin or Kraken), there are other very well-known industry leaders that are located all over the world. For example, Binance is based in Tokyo, Japan, while Bittrex is located in Liechtenstein. While there are many reasons for why an exchange would prefer to be based in one location over another, most of them boil down to business intricacies, and usually have no effect on the user of the platform. I have also listed 4 of the most popular cryptocurrencies to have been forked from Bitcoin. Some of them focus on improving the performance levels of the original Bitcoin (such as lower fees and scaling more transactions), whilst others focus on increased privacy or decentralization.

The main feature of the upgrade is to give Cardano the ability to introduce on-chain governance features.