Just to clear things up, let’s talk about the difference between a fork and the lightning network. Both of these are aimed at tackling the scalability issues of the bitcoin blockchain, which is basically its ability to manage more complex tasks.
So, what’s a Fork?
Some of the well-known bitcoin forks you might have seen mentioned here include:
SegWit, Bitcoin Gold, and Bitcoin Cash.
There are two main types of forks: Soft Fork and Hard Fork.
Soft Fork: This doesn't create new coins. It’s backward-compatible, meaning it still works with the older versions even after updates. Old nodes will still see new blocks as valid. For this type of fork, only a majority of miners need to upgrade to implement the new rules, which is easier than a hard fork.
Hard Fork: This one is different since it’s not backward-compatible. It results in a split where a new cryptocurrency is created.
Can anyone create a fork? Technically, yes. But for it to gain traction or be successful, it usually needs a positive consensus from the community.
Now, about the Lightning Network.
The concept of the lightning network was put forward by Joseph Poon and Thaddeus Dryja back in 2016. It’s layered on top of the bitcoin blockchain to address the issues tied to the core layer. The first layer is the base blockchain.
There are many Bitcoin forks, and they are shit altcoins that want to abuse "forking" for creating their useless scam altcoins.
How Many Bitcoin Forks Are There? You will be surprised!!!
Altcoins are useless, low value or even zero value and if altcoin teams try to use "Bitcoin" and "Fork" as one of their most attractive things for scamming, these "fork" projects are very dangerous to spend your money for any amount of such useless coins.
Good altcoin projects don't need to use anything like "Bitcoin" and "fork" for advertising their projects.
This is confusing, do not list soft fork and hard fork together. Those hard fork coins are not bitcoin and they are not part of bitcoin but they are altcoins.
Segwit is a soft fork.
Those like bitcoin cash, bitcoin gold and bitcoin diamond are different coins entirely, listing them with soft fork like segwit is not right at all and it can confuse people. You did not even mention them as examples in both the soft and hard fork.
I completely agree with you here. It is wrong to mention Segwit in the same breath as Bitcoin Cash, as this gives a completely false impression, especially to newcomers.
It even goes so far as to say that Bitcoin Cash (or Diamond, or ...) are their own blockchains that have nothing in common with classic Bitcoin since the forkexcept for the name reference and the past.
It would be much better to explain the difference between a soft fork and a hard fork and give examples, then the impact of each fork will become clear relatively quickly.
Lol, no. That's a candidate for the most hilarious nonsense comparison in the history of Bitcointalk.
Scalability issues can't be "solved" by a "fork". They can be solved with new features, for example features enabling second layers.
And no, BCash (even if it's a "fork" from Bitcoin) isn't improving "scalability" either. BCash only increases the block size, but the real bottlenecks for scalability are the nodes' bandwidth and CPU/GPU/memory usage. If you increase the block size, you also increase the cost to run a node. Only if you find a way that not all transactions have to be stored and transmitted by all nodes (layer-2) then you can talk about real scalability.
BCash is also an independent currency and does not affect Bitcoin's scalability at all.
Thought about reporting the opening post as low-quality trash but instead leaving it be.
Hilariously inaccurate, it serves as a good example of WHY one needs to know what they are talking about before even thinking about writing a technical 'what is' post..
I've tagged OP[1], but he decided to create another shitpost. So i might as well poke his statement.
2 conflicting statement, where 2nd statement prove fork isn't always about solving scalability issues.
Hard fork usually doesn't create new coin, unless the community can't agree decide to split. For example, BCH had hard fork that raise block size from 8MB to 32MB. But it doesn't lead to new coin being created.
https://web.archive.org/web/20150228162703/http://lightning.network/ prove LN introduced by them in 2015.
While theoretically it's possible to use GPU, are there any full node software that actually use GPU for computing purpose (not mining)?
[1] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5482297.msg66088782#msg66088782
Yes, the origninal BCH coin was the result of an intentional hard fork away from BTC done by folks outside of the Core dev group. Same as with all altcoins, from day-1 it's creator wanted a new coin and more importantly a new chain they could pre-mine the hell out of.
ABC's point was that under certain circumstances (in this case, the sole creator and largest holder of BCH wanting to change it) there was no opposition so the coin & chain remained the same despite the hard fork.
There should be a chain split in a hard fork, but that should be if there is a consensus. With bitcoin cash (BCH), there was no consensus, but Bitcoin Cash developers moved to create another coin themselves, but bitcoin is still bitcoin.
Assuming if BCH receive up to 70% of support that signals for the upgrade instead of the 37% that it had, there will be a chain split. The old chain which is still the one bitcoin is using now will be left for the new one and the new coin will be BCH. It may not be called BTC but remain as BTC but there will be a chain split and a new coin. BCH is not a new coin, it supposed not to be created because there was no consensus.
If there is a chain split, BCH of today supposed to be BTC as the old chain would be left, but no new coin created but BCH which is an altcoin that was created after no consensus.
But it is possible that if there was more support for BCH and there was chain split and new bitcoin was created, some miners and nodes may continue to support the old bitcoin just like what happened to ETH which was newly created after an upgrade while some miners and nodes stayed on the old chain and named the old ETH as ETHW (old ETH). I think it happened with ethereum classic and ETH. I just use the altcoins as an example because no upgrade that I know about bitcoin that caused chain split.
With hard fork, bitcoin will have to have a chain split, making it non-backward compatible, new blockchain will be created, nodes have to upgrade and move to the new chain.
Soft fork is backward compatible and no chain split is the difference it has with hard fork.
Do not let BCH articles you see online to confuse you, there was no new coin (no new bitcoin) that was created.
I get his point now. It was the increased of 1mb-8mb that caused the initial chain split with issuance of BCH.
8mb to 32 mb was another hard fork entirely and was a consensus community agreement.