Presenting A History of Bitcoin Hard Forks – Part 2

The Continuation Of The Previous Post

Continuing from the previous post here are some of the hard forks of Bitcoin that have gained popularity amongst others. Whereas there has been much more to these as each one was insufficient needing another hard fork all these helps the miners create even more robust and reliable hard forks each time.

Bitcoin Unlimited

With Bitcoin Unlimited comes something of an enigma thereby some two years after its release with the project’s developers released code but did not specify what the type of fork it would require. This is where Bitcoin Unlimited sets apart by allowing miners to decide on the size of their blocks with nodes and miners limiting the size of blocks they accept up to 16 megabytes where despite some lingering interest, Bitcoin Unlimited has largely failed to gain acceptance. 

Segregated Witness

It was the Bitcoin core developer Peter Wuille who presented the idea of Segregated Witness (SegWit) and simply put it aims to reduce the size of each Bitcoin transaction thereby allowing more transactions to take place at once. It was technically a soft fork, whereas it may have helped to prompt hard forks after it was originally proposed. 

Bitcoin Cash

Some Bitcoin developers and users in response to SegWit decided to initiate a hard fork to avoid the protocol updates it brought about. This Bitcoin Cash was the result of this hard fork splitting off from the main blockchain as the Bitcoin cash wallets rejected Bitcoin transactions and blocks.

This hard fork as it remains the most successful hard fork of the primary cryptocurrency, Bitcoin cash is the fourth-largest digital currency by market cap owing in part to the backing of many prominent figures in the cryptocurrency community with many popular exchanges. This is how Bitcoin Cash allows blocks of 8 megabytes and did not adopt the SegWit protocol.  

Bitcoin Gold

As a hard fork followed several months after Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin Gold came with creators of this aiming to restore the mining functionality with basic graphics processing units as they felt that mining had become too specialized in terms of equipment and hardware required. A unique feature of the Bitcoin Gold hard fork was a post mine, a process by which the development team mined 100,000 coins after the fork had taken place. Whereby many of these coins were placed into a special endowment and developers indicated that this endowment will be used to grow and finance the Bitcoin Gold ecosystem, with a portion of those coins being set aside as payment for developers as well. It was generally found that Bitcoin Gold adheres to many of the basic principles of Bitcoin as however, it differs in terms of the proof-of-work algorithm requiring miners. 

SegWit2x

Following the implementation of SegWit developers planned on a second component to the protocol upgrade known as SegWit2X triggering a hard fork stipulating a block size of 2 megabytes as slated to take place as a hard fork. There have been several companies and individuals in the Bitcoin community that has originally backed SegWit protocol decoding to back out of the hard fork in the second component. Thereby some of these backlashes were a result of SegWit2X including opt-in replay protection; as a major impact on the types of transactions that the new fork would have accepted. 

The team behind SegWit2X had announced that their planned hard fork has been canceled as a result of discrepancies among previous backers of the project. 

Finally, Where Are The Hard Forks Targeted To? 

Whereas in a few short years Bitcoin has already spawned a large number of forks where no one can say for sure that it’s likely that the cryptocurrency will continue to experience both soft and hard forks into the future as well continually growing the cryptocurrency community also making it increasingly complicated. As the currencies continue to pose challenges, newer forks are being churned out. This helps the developers gain more idea of creating a perfect crypto world. This is where there are even more kinds of cryptocurrencies those who need even finer versions. Make sure you get the complete list as the hard forking continues and there is always one or the other hard fork attracting more developers. The technology is stable and supports many of the hard forks by just working on the Bitcoin. Stay tuned as we bring you more details and you get to know the crypto world closer than ever.