Bitcoin hard forks have been an integral part of the cryptocurrency’s history, but their effect has chiefly changed how Bitcoin looks and functions. You may use platforms like Bitcoin Buyer that offer bitcoin trading features like accurate and effective strategies. Moreover, you will get live customer support. It is essential to keep track of these hard forks to understand better the cryptocurrency market trendline and sentiments, which will be coming up off and on over the next few years. This timeline closely examines the last eight major hard forks that created new versions of Bitcoin.
Recently, BTC has incurred numerous variations with a similar notion and system. Still, it differs from the actual version of bitcoin. There are numerous examples of bitcoin branching out into multiple versions; it includes: The original BTC, which is the ‘Master version’ or simply the “Bitcoin (BTC)” Minor versions like Bitcoin Cash (BCH), Bitcoin Gold (BTG), Bitcoin Diamond (CD) and Bitcoin Private (BTCP).
The most significant of the few forks that split the bitcoin community into two, resulting in a new version known as “bitcoin cash,” is mainly focused on improving the transaction speed. This event happened on August 1st, 2017, after the implementation of Segwit. The emergence of BCH marked a milestone in the cryptocurrency world. Here explained is the complete timeline of bitcoin hard forks.
What is a bitcoin hard fork?
Bitcoin hard fork (or coin split) happens when a group of core developers cannot agree on the future development of the Bitcoin network. After this, miners will start mining two versions of Bitcoin, with some changes in their code. It happens after disagreements on increasing the block size limit, which restricts how many transactions can be processed per second. Some wanted an increased block size limit, while others wanted to reduce it.
A history of bitcoin hard forks
Bitcoin XT
It is a modification of the bitcoin blockchain, which an introduction in 2015. It was planned to be executed via a soft fork, and the switch would be mandatory after a fixed date. But it failed as not many people were working on it, and some were even against it because they were following satoshis original whitepaper. Its creator, Mike Hearn, even declared that bitcoin XT has failed.
Bitcoin Classic
Introduced in 2016, Bitcoin classic is another branch of the original bitcoin blockchain to improve the scalability issue by raising the block size limit to 2 megabytes. Unfortunately, the community negatively received the event as it did not have the consensus required for a hard fork to succeed and lost its traction within a few months.
Bitcoin Unlimited
Bitcoin Unlimited (BU) proposed a hard fork on May 24th, 2017, to allow miners to vote for their preferred block size limit. They planned on making this change via a hard fork at block 479559. The purpose of this fork is to increase the block size limit to 20MB by removing the block size limit in the code. The fork gained traction within the community for a short time but lost it when many miners started mining alternative currencies after a pool of hash-power formed around Bitcoin Unlimited.
In April 2018, several cryptocurrencies were experiencing hard forks according to their community’s wishes. As you can see, one more hard fork is in the works with Bitcoin Cash (BCH) forking off from the original bitcoin blockchain on August 1st, 2017. Besides that, there are other bitcoin forks like Bitcoin Gold (BTG), Bitcoin Diamond(CD), and Bitcoin Private (BTCP).
Segregated Witness
Segwit is a hard fork that changes the existing block size limit from 1 megabyte to 2 megabytes. It makes the blocks smaller as they fit in data packets in the blockchain and increases efficiency by signalling that all future transactions must be below the new 1MB limit.
The market sets transaction fees for Bitcoin transactions; however, in a global economy, there will always be some transactions (both small and large) that will get delayed by their transfer fee is too high.
Bitcoin Cash
Bitcoin Cash is a hard fork of bitcoin. It is similar to the original bitcoin with an 8MB block size. The block size allows more transactions to get processed per second, making the transaction faster and cheaper. Thus Bitcoin Cash is a revolt against central banks or the government takeover of money.
Bitcoin Gold
Bitcoin Gold (similarity: Bitcoin) is another hard fork planned by Jack Liao’s LightningAsic, which occurred in October 2017. It created a new version of bitcoin that aims to decentralize mining by changing bitcoin’s proof-of-work algorithm from SHA256 to Equihash, which is ASIC-resistant. It also creates “Bitgold,” a new digital asset based on the same algorithm as bitcoin.
Bitcoin Diamond
Bitcoin Diamond is a fork of Bitcoin that occurred in late 2017; it is similar to the original bitcoin with an 8MB block size. But zero-confirmation transactions are not possible with Bitcoin Diamond.
Bitcoin Private
The purpose of this fork is to reduce the total amount of cryptocurrency supply and increase privacy by eliminating the public blockchain. It uses a new and anonymous algorithm called “Cryptonight.”
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