Steeemit Crypto Academy Season 3 Week 4 Homework-Post for Professor @Awesononso by @Nikoyana

Good day to everyone on this amazing platform, today i will be presenting on blockchain fork as taught by our lecturer @awesononso

1)What is a fork. (In your own words).

Fork is a new development or feature that is been added on the blockchain in order to improve the function of the blockchain such as increasing or decreasing the size of a block, these development leads to the generation of new chain coupled with the old chain, the new chain was developed as a result of difference in consensus amongst the nodes on the blockchain, in a sense that there are nodes that agreed to the development and switched over to the new chain and there are nodes that do not agree with the development so these nodes stick with the old blockchain, since blockchain is a decentralized network and no group of nodes can control the network every nodes is allowed to make or stick with their choice of chain whether the new development or the old one.

2)Explain in details what a Hard Fork is with examples (can be of any blockchain).

Hard fork is termed as rigid, is a new software update or development when implemented into the blockchain enables to improve performance and brings about a difference in the blockchain because other nodes do not agree to the new software or development, these nodes continue to stay with the original chain while the other nodes who agreed to the development move over to the new protocol or chain bringing about two branches of chain the old and the updated. A node that has not been updated cannot operate on the new protocol or version, with these some nodes follow the old rule while others follow the new rule.

The newly forked chain becomes incompatible with the old chain, meaning the updated nodes will see the old nodes as invalid and the old nodes will see the updated nodes as invalid because the new nodes are updated while the old nodes are not updated, with these the nodes of the newest development will no longer accept the old version of the blockchain, as a matter of time if the nodes that adhered with the original protocol in the near future decides to work with the new software will need to upgrade their software to the new one.

Example of hard fork is bitcoin cash which was forked from bitcoin.

SOFT FORK.
Soft fork is termed as flexible because new updates can be implemented in the blockchain in conjunction with the old update as far as the new update does not break the rule of the previous blockchain enabling both the new and old protocol co-exist as one, this is why it is termed as compactible.

Example if the new rule was that a block size was reduced from 1mb to 500kb all the nodes must follow these rules and if any node follows the previous rule of block size of 1mb that block will be termed invalid and exempted from the block chain because that block did not adhere to the new rule of 500kb.From here onwards upgraded blocks and non-upgraded blocks can process transactions as long as these blocks don’t break the new rules of 500kb block size.

Example of soft fork is segwit of the bitcoin blockchain.

4) What are the differences between hard forks and soft forks.

1)In soft forks the existing chain is improved and updated while in Hard fork there is a total split from the existing chain.

2)In hard fork nodes that have not upgraded cannot participate in verifying transactions but in soft fork nodes that have not upgraded can participate in verifying transactions.

3)Hard fork are not compactible with the old version of the network while soft forks are compactible with the old version of the network.

5)Bitcoin cash (BCH): bitcoin was released in 2009 by Satoshi Nakamoto and it operated smoothly with low fees and fast transactions for some years but with time it became expensive and processing of transactions became slower leading to congestion of transactions this happened due to increase of the users on the network.

A community on the bitcoin network known as segregated witness (SEGWIT) brought an opinion for signature data to be removed from blocks in order to free the storage spaces on blocks to process more transactions but this was opposed by a group of community developers who suggested that the block size should be increased from 1MB to 8MB which will enable more transactions to be processed, this requires splitting from the main chain which led to the creation of bitcoin cash.

On August 2017 bitcoin cash which is a hard fork was created which was forked out of bitcoin and bitcoin cash was able to process up to 61 transactions per second with lower fees while bitcoin processes 3-7 transactions per second.
After the fork the two-protocol existed differently on the blockchain.

Segregated witnesses (segwit) : is an upgraded soft fork which is done by removing data signatures from the transaction block in order to reduce the size of transaction on a block to allow more transactions to be approved and confirmed. Segwit does not require consensus to be implemented
Segwit was introduced by Peter Wiulle during a scalling bitcoin conference in 2015.

6)Write on steem and hive hard fork show similarities in their genesis block.(Provide screenshot)

Hive was forked out of steem due to the dispute between the witness community and the Tron team that took over the network.
Hive has two main equivalent tokens known as hive and hive back dollar (hbd) with its level power as hive power (HP) while steemit rewarding token is steem back dollar and its main token is steem with its level power as steem power (SP).

Steem is available on many exhanges while hive is available on few exchanges and hive is ranked 191 with a price of 0.2817, steem has a price of 0.3479 and ranked 173.

The similarity between the steem and hive hard fork in their genesis block is that their block id and witness signature as indicated below are the same.

Conclusion
Both hard and soft forks are meant to bring a better performance and development to the blockchain, also the forked version of the original network shares the same genesis block features with the original.

Cc :
@awesononso