What Is A Bitcoin Hard Fork - Explained

In 2009 Satoshi Nakamoto released Bitcoin. Since then, it is still unknown if he was an individual, or it was a group of people who used a pseudonym and decided to create something different that would impact the financial field. 

Bitcoin is the first to be released and paved the way for other digital currencies to come to the market.

Nakamoto had his concept and an initial program based on which he created Bitcoin. In the first days, only a few enthusiasts were passionate about the new currency, but very soon, people started to recognize the potential. So, the number of miners and people that hold bitcoins and pay with it began to grow fast.

Therefore, other people took the Nakamoto Bitcoin model and tried to adapt to or improve upon it, creating variations based on the same underlying concept and program but different from the original. This process is known as forking, where blockchain itself divides into two distinct entities.

So, basically, a hard fork is a split of blockchain. In cases like this, blockchain splits into two chains: the bitcoin blockchain and the chain of a new coin.

What are some of the hard fork cases?

The most famous case of Bitcoin's hard fork is Bitcoin Cash. On August 1st, 2017, The Bitcoin Network had to find a solution for the scalability issue, and Bitcoin Cash provided higher transaction speed, and it was less decentralized.

There are many other Bitcoin forks such as Bitcoin XT, Bitcoin Classic, Bitcoin Unlimited, Segregated Witness (SegWit), Bitcoin Gold, and SegWit2x.

In only a few years, bitcoin has generated a large number of forks. It is not 100% sure, but it's possible that the cryptocurrency will continue to encounter both soft and hard forks into the future and continue to grow the cryptocurrency community while also making it increasingly complex.