Digi B starts Show 3 with the most basic question:
What the fork is a fork? The short answer is that when an existing blockchain is forked it creates two new chains at the block height of the fork. At the point of the fork, all transactions on that blockchain would occur on two separate chains. But before that split, the newly forked chain shares the history of all previous transactions made on the parent chain.
Prof K approaches the question from a finance perspective. It’s free money! A fork can be well compared to a spin-off IPO of an unwanted subsidiary in the stock world. Some investors reinvest earnings from forked coins back into BTC, others accumulate a fat wallet of forked coins on the off-chance that maybe they will be as valuable as BTC one day.
Mr. Lo brings the perspective of a developer. The word “fork” has multiple meanings in software development depending on the context. Most recently the term is an integral part of the process of social software development, a practice made more efficient when Linus Torvald, creator of Linux, unleashed git to the world. Forking allows collaborators on git-based code repositories to organize a project in a decentralized manner. Each contributor has a copy of the original project and makes changes and improvements locally that they submit as pull-requests to the OP. It’s just a part of the workflow where you “fork” a copy of the code in order to experiment with it. For blockchain projects, a “fork” is an upgrade mechanism. If it is based on consensus the blockchain doesn’t change. If there are political or philosophical differences, the fork can lead to a new coin and a split in the developer community.
What kind of forks are there? There are three basic types of forks: unintentional, soft fork, and hard fork. In the short history of blockchain, there are two fork events that every crypto enthusiast should know about. The first occurred on July 20, 2016 when developers on Ethereum, led by Vitalik Buterin and Consensys among others, rolled back the DAO hack and created a fork on the Ethereum blockchain. The coders that disagreed with this decision stayed on the Ethereum Classic chain. The second must-know fork occurred on August 1, 2017 when, again due to philosophical differences, a subset of BTC miners chose to create a fork of the BTC code in order to increase the block size of BTC blocks from 1 MB to 8 MB. This fork created BTC Cash. Both of these forks represent contentious hard forks. By contrast, the STEEM blockchain has conducted 20 hard forks with community consensus that, although they may have been a hassle to the community, provided robust upgrades and wholesale changes to the protocol.
In general, knowing about forks in the blockchain industry is important because, as we like to say on BLOCK RUNNERS, we want to delineate the good from the bad. Although many forks occur due to legitimate divergences in philosophy, some of these projects are outright cash grabs! If you want to determine the quality of your forked coins, we suggest checking the project’s activity on GitHub and the LinkedIn profiles of project leadership. If you find yourself questioning the future of the project after that little bit of research, sell those forking coins!
Shownote Resources: https://vitalik.ca/general/2017/03/14/forks_and_markets.html https://www.coindesk.com/short-guide-bitcoin-forks-explained https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Getting-Started-A-Short-History-of-Git https://www.linuxfoundation.org/blog/2015/04/10-years-of-git-an-interview-with-git-creator-linus-torvalds/ https://www.cryptocompare.com/coins/guides/the-dao-the-hack-the-soft-fork-and-the-hard-fork/ http://fortune.com/2017/08/11/bitcoin-cash-hard-fork-price-date-why/
Find us at https://www.linkedin.com/company/blockrunners Digi B (Chris Barnett) Twitter: @cbvids Professor K (Nic Krapels) Twitter: @shanghaipreneur Mr. Lo (Amal Sudama) Twitter: @cdsudama