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Hello steemians and fellow Crypto Academy students. I have always wondered why there is multiple currency or coins in the cryptocurrency market with similar names, thanks to this lesson I now fully understands what is happening. I want to thank professor @awesononso for a consistent beautiful lessons and explanation. This is my homework post on Fork in Blockchain.

Question 1 WHAT IS A FORK? (In your own words)

Fork can be defined as a change in protocol/rule of a blockchain or when a blockchain diverges into two part forward. Fork can happen in a blockchain at anytime, sometimes it happens when two or more parties are not in agreement, or when there is need for an upgrade and developers agree to improve the network. Some forks are short-lived while others are permanent.

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Question 2. EXPLAIN IN DETAILS WHAT A HARD FORK IS WITH EXAMPLES (Can be of any blockchain)

WHAT IS HARD FORK?

A hardfork is a radical change in the protocol of a blockchain that result to two different branches which share the same history but walk parallel to each other.
In a hard fork, all users are expected to update to the new protocol to have access to the blockchain and users who don't update later realise they are outdated and need to update.
The occurence of hard fork give birth to a new currency and there is usually a high probably of the holder of the coins in the old Blockchain will have the new coins that are being created.

ETHEREUM HARD FORK.

There have been a couple of hard fork with the Ethereum currency but the most talked about. The Ethereum blockchain is a DAO that is Decentralized Autonomous Organization which launched it crown funding in 2016.

In June 2016, hackers exploited the vulnerability of the blockchain to siphon funds. This later led to the Ethereum blockchain being hard fork into two branches to return the siphon funds back to the original contract where investors could withdraw their money and to protect the funds. The unforked blockchain was maintained as Ethereum classic

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Question 3. EXPLAIN IN DETAILS WHAT A SOFT FORK IS WITH EXAMPLES ( Can be of any blockchain).

WHAT IS SOFT FORK?

Unlike Hard fork which creates two parallel chains and require nodes to upgrade to a new protocol, a soft fork actually upgrades the whole chain to new protocols in the network. In this manner, a soft fork can be referred to as Backward compatible since it permits communication between old and new chains.
In a soft fork, what commonly happens is the addition of a new rule that doesn't class with old or existing rules. So nodes doesn't need yo upgrade to new rules before accessing the network as is the case in hard fork.

BITCOIN SOFT FORK.

The Bitcoin soft fork was know as Segregated Witness "Segwit" and occurred the same year with the Bitcoin Hard fork. The main aim of this soft fork was to reduce the size of the Bitcoin transaction to increase the number of transaction that could be contain per block.
It was in view of the proposal of Segwit that some developers were not comfortable with the upgrade/whole idea and so decided a hard fork which led to the creation of Bitcoin Cash ( BCH) in 2016.

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Question 4. WHAT ARE THE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN HARD FORKS AND SOFT WORKS?

HARD FORK	SOFT FORK
Communication is not possible with old nodes, it is backward incompatible	Communication with old nodes is possible, it backward compatible
Creation of a new currency	No new currency is created through soft forking
There is a complete split of Blockchain network	No split occurs
Requires upgrade to function in the new network	No upgrade is required from nodes.

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Question 5 **EXPLAIN THE FOLLOWING BITCOIN FORKS AND EXPLORE THE BLOCKCHAIN WHERE NECESSARY. INDICATE IF THEY ARE HARD FORK OR SOFT FORK.;

• BITCOIN CASH
• SEGREGATED WITNESS.**

BITCOIN CASH

The Bitcoin cash occured in 2017 as a result of the proposal by one Bitcoin core developer, Pieter Wuille to reduce the size of transaction on the Bitcoin blockchain. Some developers did not agree and so went to creat a complete new branch and currency from the Bitcoin blockchain and so created BCH. This was a Hard fork.

SEGREGATED WITNESS.

As earlier mentioned, this was proposed by Dr Pieter Wuille in 2015. The segregated witness not Segwit was a soft fork and the main aim was to reduce the size of transaction in the Bitcoin blockchain.
This soft fork finally occured around July 2016 after the split of Bitcoin cash.

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Question 6. WRITE ON THE STEEM AND HIVE HARD FORK AND SHOW SIMILARITIES IN THEIR GENESIS BLOCKS ( Provide screenshots)

Just like every other Blockchain, Steemit has undergone Forking in it's life time. The forking in Steemit happened some few years back when Justin Sun, owner of TRON bought Steemit and it required an integration/ merger.

This caused a dispute amongst owners and developers in the Steemit community giving rise to Hard fork. HIVE was created as a result of this disagreement. The HIVE platform is a blogging platform similar to Steemit, we can even gain Access to the platform using Steemit credentials. The currencies received by bloggers is HBD and Hive.

Let's explore both the Genesis block of Steemit and Hive to show similarities.

We go to the Hive explorer and search for Block 1.

As can be seen from the screenshot above, the miner for the first block is Initminer. We will see the same person mining the first block in Steemit.

Now let's look at Block 2000 in Hive.

The miner of block 2000 is Steemit 15.

Now let's go to Steemitworld and take a look at Block 1 and block 2000

As can be seen from the above Images, the miners for Block 1 and Block 2000 are Initminer and Steemit15 respectively for both Steemit and Hive. This simply means that, even after Fork, the blockchain network remains the same.

CONCLUSION

One of the main purpose of blockchain technology was to introduce Decentralization and give everyone one a say. This however, will always give rise to disagreement as everyone will not always agree on the way forward.

With the help Forking, it is possible for group of people to disagree and part ways. Also due to forking, errors and weaknesses can be corrected like in the case of Ethereum hack which led to the Hard fork.

In conclusion, forking is a very important process in the blockchain network.

CC.
@awesononso