Fork

BlockworksJul 16, 2019 ⋅ 1 min read

Written by Saurabh Deshpande

Introduction

A fork is when a blockchain splits, which can happen for a variety of reasons. If two miners mine the same block, then a temporary partition occurs and whichever one has the next block added becomes the legitimate chain. These happen fairly regularly and are not typically considered problematic.

When a blockchain has upgrades or bug fixes, they occur through non-contentious soft forks. These are backwards compatible meaning old versions of the software can still participate in the network.

Hard forks occur when nodes cannot agree on a change, and they lead to a permanent split in the network as we saw with Bitcoin Cash.

Suggested Reading

A Short Guide to Bitcoin Forks

Blockchain Forks

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Outline
  • Introduction
  • Suggested Reading