The bifurcations in blockchain networks, also known as forks, are updates made to solve functional problems in the code of the chains, which can lead to definitive separations of projects due to technical or ideological disagreements that have been debated without reaching consensus by the community of developers and users. In the particular case of the Bitcoin network, there have already been 19 bifurcations posted on the platform and more are expected to occur in the future.

This number of bifurcations has been collected by Bitmex, highlighting all the characteristics and reasons for these ramifications. The study generated a story tracing Bitcoin's behavior from 2010 to the present 2017, differentiating between the softfork (adjustments of the block validation consensus rules) from the hardfork (new consensus rules in blockchain) that have occurred in this period of time.

The publication highlights that in 2010 6 forks were made. The first bifurcation was a softfork that fixed a critical bug that allowed anyone to spend any number of bitcoins. This bug had to be fixed twice; in the second one, the evaluations of the script signatures and the public script keys were also separated.

Another softfork of great relevance at that time was the one that limited the size of blockchain blocks to 1MB, an update that has resulted in fierce debates in the community and the birth of new projects such as Bitcoin Cash.

However, the most curious softfork of that year was the one that corrected the erroneous creation of 184.5 billion bitcoins (when the maximum number of bitcoins to be created was set at 21 million). This incident resulted in a 5-hour separation. The 0.5 BTC input transaction that facilitated this error still remains unspent.

In 2012, only two softfork were given: the first disable transactions with the same ID; the second allowed transactions to send a script hash instead of a public key to increase the privacy of transfers. There were no drawbacks in this respect.

In 2013, there are 4 forks, including an unplanned hardfork caused by the removal of a group of data (which was corrected with a return of miners to the previous version) and which allowed a double expense of $10,000 dollars; also the change was made in the signaling of the transactions that incorporated the height of the blocks to the coinbase data.

On the other hand, the most controversial hardfork of that year was that of the block that violated the 10,000 BDB block boundary rule (later relaxed rule), an event that is still discussed by subject matter specialists to clarify whether it was indeed a fork or not, and, if there has ever really been a hardfork on the net.

Gregory Maxwell, developer of Bitcoin Core, commented on this incident stating that Bitcoin's platform is not about hardfork as such, but only about accidents on the network:

"It is debatable whether this was really a hardfork, because it is quasi-non-deterministic. Previous bug fixes were fixed where previous versions got stuck and stopped synchronizing the chain before that happened. So I think that following a really strong definition of creating a chain of blocks that violates the rules imposed by previous versions, we have never had a hardfork."

In the 2015 period, two bifurcations occurred that made it possible to introduce Bitcoin's first new network function: checking the blocking time. In addition, the mining incentive was also eliminated to allow late transactions, a measure that was applied in 2016 with more than 90% success.

However, 2017 was one of the busiest years in the hardfork sector, as signalling for the activation of SegWit, which had 80% activation throughout the network, began to be introduced on a mandatory basis. Similarly, the segregated tokens were updated on the platform recently, being this one of the last hardfork presented by the network.

Forks not only exist to repair errors and optimize chains. All cryptocurrencies - not the ERC20 tokens - have been born from bifurcations in previous chains. However, mentioning each of the forks that have created new currencies from bitcoin blockchain would take too long and is not the purpose of this article. However, we can mention that this December has been marked by a feast of new proposals for the network and next year is approaching as the start of various projects. Many updates are still missing for a developing network such as bitcoin blockchain, so this list of bifurcations will only continue to grow.