Knowing About Forks And Its Mechanism In Crypto Industry Along With SegWit

Before going to bitcoin forks and Segwit which is also called segregated witness we will first go into the definition of forks.

What Exactly Is A Fork?

A fork in cryptocurrency is a term that is used for a cryptocurrency that is the new version of an old cryptocurrency. When a fork happens there is some sort of change that is brought to s cryptocurrency that gives rise to two separate blockchain paths that share the same history. The fork so formed can exist even for some time which means temporary or also it can be a permanent fork as well. The fork to any currency can be sought for many distinguished reasons. There are two types of forks one is soft and the other is hard, to bring changes to the BTC software either one fork is required. like this software , to learn more about bitcoin.

Soft Fork

The changes brought with the help of a soft fork are “backwards compatible” with that of the predecessor version. It means that the older version that you are using does not need any update in the bitcoin software. Any new block that is being formed after there is a soft fork, will still be held compatible with that of the previous version and will also be recognized. The users, whether they are new or the old ones will still mine the fresh blocks on the blockchain which will be the same for both parties. Since the network in such a situation remains the same for the user, it will not give rise to the formation of any new cryptocurrency.

When one group of users opt for the update and upgrade to the new version it means that the soft fork is complete and has occurred but when the other group decides to not go with the new version will execute the formation of a hard fork.

Hard Fork

A hard fork is opposite to a soft fork. The group of users on a blockchain has to make updates to the new software. Each of the users must continue their journey. Once a hard fork is made it is not compatible backwardly with the previous version. To get elected to identify the new blocks on a blockchain, the users have to implement the new version of their software.

When a hard fork occurs it causes a split to the blockchain network, and that set of users that opt for the hard fork gives rise to form a new currency altogether. When the split happens the two different versions formed are independent of each other and they are no longer the same. For example, if users had bitcoin when the split took place, can also claim the forked coin often on the network that was split.

Segregated Witness

A person named Pieter Wuille who was one of the members of the Bitcoin Core development team is the inventor of Segregated Witness. It was a protocol update in bitcoin that changed the structure of the transaction data. It came out as a soft fork of BTC. Without making any changes in the block size of BTC, SegWit focused on improving the BTC’s scalability issues. To remain on its blockchain, it does not require any change. Hence if miners have not updated to this version, they can still confirm the transactions and add them to the blockchain.

The Bottom Line

The concept of a hard and soft fork is mentioned in this blog along with an example of Segwit. Whenever any change is needed in any cryptocurrency, this is implemented with the help of forks as mentioned above.