Blockchain 101: "Hard Fork" vs "Soft Forks"

If you're new to Blockchain technology, but equally as interested then you'll have likely realized by now that learning about the topic at hand is not as simple as a lot of the news tends to make it seem, with all of their "get rich quick" stories of people buying Bitcoin at $100, and selling at $19,000.

Simply put, there's a lot to learn, and a lot of these large and flashy headlines make it seem like a get rich quick scheme or even a scam - and while there are a lot of illegitimate schemes out there, in reality, Cryptocurrency is a markedly complex world of algorithms, and decades worth of cryptographic research.

So if you're one of those people who has come to learn about cryptocurrency outside of the technology industry, then do not get scared by all of the technical jargon of the Cryptography and Cryptocurrency world. Instead, consider this the first of many articles on the basics and fundamentals of Blockchain, Cryptocurrency, and Cryptography.

This following article will be covering Hard and Soft network "forks".

Hard and Soft Forks:

A fork is a divergence in a blockchain. Be it temporary (A soft fork) or permanent (A hard fork).
Understanding the implications on forks is imperative to understanding how key changes are made to a blockchain.

SOFT FORKS:

A soft fork is a temporary divergence in a blockchain, in software development, it is a way of applying new rules to the system, and requires a majority of the nodes on the network to aggree in order for the fork to pass.

In a soft fork scenario, the old blockchain accepts shares from both upgraded and non-upgraded nodes. Meaning that it is backwards compatible with older nodes. On the other hand, the new chain does not accept blocks from the nodes that rejected the changes, meaning that some nodes can continue to operate on the old ruleset rather than changing.

HARD FORKS:

A hard fork is a permanent divergence from the blockchain. It requires all nodes or users to upgrade to the newest version of the protocol software. In this type of fork, nodes using the old versions will no longer be accepted by the newest version of the chain.

This essentially creates two separate blockchains for a node to follow. One which has the upgraded protocol software, and a previous blockchain following the old rules.

A famous example of a hard fork is that of Bitcoin, and Bitcoin Cash.

BTC was hard forked in 2017, with the creation of Bitcoin Cash; which fundamentally changes key aspects of how the blockchain operates. Most notably, the increase in the block-size from 1MB to 8MB.

Another (suspected) hard fork of Bitcoin is that of Litecoin.

As the name suggests, Litecoin markets itself as a Lighter version of Bitcoin. It aims for faster transaction speeds and greater flexibility.

As of right now, Bitcoin is said to have been forked over 70 times in one way or another.