Hard Fork

What Does Hard Fork Mean?

A hard fork in the world of bitcoin and cryptocurrency is a phenomenon in which a change forces certain divergences in the blockchain, as a result of miner or user activity or a change in rules. In the world of cryptocurrency, there are hard forks and soft forks; unlike a soft fork, a hard fork does not resolve automatically according to user trends.

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Techopedia Explains Hard Fork

Defining and describing hard forks is tricky, partially due to various emerging opinions on what constitutes a hard fork, and partly due to debate on whether a particular change was a hard fork or not. There is widespread consensus that the emergence of Bitcoin Cash as an alternative to Bitcoin Classic was a hard fork – one good definition of a hard fork posted on forums is that in a hard fork, “node consensus diverges permanently” – for example, as a result of Bitcoin Cash, there are now two distinct bitcoin models that are completely separate, leading to the characterization of the change as a hard fork. By contrast, items like the implementation of Segregated Witness are generally called soft forks as they are more backwards-compatible.

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Margaret Rouse

Margaret Rouse is an award-winning technical writer and teacher known for her ability to explain complex technical subjects to a non-technical, business audience. Over the past twenty years her explanations have appeared on TechTarget websites and she's been cited as an authority in articles by the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine and Discovery Magazine.Margaret's idea of a fun day is helping IT and business professionals learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages. If you have a suggestion for a new definition or how to improve a technical explanation, please email Margaret or contact her…