List of bitcoin forks

Last updated

Bitcoin forks are defined variantly as changes in the protocol of the bitcoin network or as the situations that occur "when two or more blocks have the same block height". [1] A fork influences the validity of the rules. Forks are typically conducted in order to add new features to a blockchain, to reverse the effects of hacking or catastrophic bugs. Forks require consensus to be resolved or else a permanent split emerges.

Contents

Forks of the client software

The following are forks of the software client for the bitcoin network:

Bitcoin XT
A fork initiated by Mike Hearn. The current reference implementation for bitcoin contains a computational bottleneck. [2] The actual fork was preceded by Mike Hearn publishing a Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP 64) on June 10, 2014, calling for the addition of "a small P2P protocol extension that performs UTXO lookups given a set of outpoints." [src 1] On December 27, 2014 Hearn released version 0.10 of the forked client XT, with the BIP 64 changes. [src 2] It achieved significant attention within the bitcoin community in mid-2015 amid a contentious debate among core developers over increasing the block size cap. [3] [4]
On June 22, 2015, Gavin Andresen published BIP 101 calling for an increase in the maximum block size. The changes would activate a fork allowing eight MB blocks (doubling in size every two years) once 75% of a stretch of 1,000 mined blocks is achieved after the beginning of 2016. [src 3] The new maximum transaction rate under XT would have been 24 transactions per second. [5]
On August 6, 2015 Andresen's BIP101 proposal was merged into the XT codebase. [src 4] [src 5] Bip 101 was reverted [src 6] and the 2-MB block size bump of Bitcoin Classic was applied instead.[ citation needed ]
The August 2015 release of XT received widespread media coverage. The Guardian wrote that "bitcoin is facing civil war". [3]
Wired wrote that "Bitcoin XT exposes the extremely social—extremely democratic—underpinnings of the open source idea, an approach that makes open source so much more powerful than technology controlled by any one person or organization." [6] Developer Adam Back was critical of the 75% activation threshold being too low and that some of the changes were insecure. [7]
On August 25, 2017, Bitcoin XT published Release G, which was a Bitcoin Cash client by default. [src 7] Subsequently, Release H was published, which supported the November 2017 Bitcoin Cash protocol upgrade, followed by Release I, which supported the May 2018 Bitcoin Cash protocol upgrade.[ citation needed ]
Bitcoin Classic
In its first 8 months, Bitcoin Classic promoted a single increase of the maximum block size from one megabyte to two megabytes. [8] [4] In November 2016 this changed and the project moved to a solution that moved the limit out of the software rules into the hands of the miners and nodes. [9]
Bitcoin Unlimited

All three software clients attempt to increase transaction capacity of the network. None achieved a majority of the hash power. [10] [4]

Intended hard forks splitting the cryptocurrency

Hard forks splitting bitcoin (aka "split coins") are created via changes of the blockchain rules and sharing a transaction history with bitcoin up to a certain time and date. The first hard fork splitting bitcoin happened on 1 August 2017, resulting in the creation of Bitcoin Cash.

The following is a list of notable hard forks splitting bitcoin by date and/or block:

Intended soft forks splitting from a not-most-work block

Intended soft forks splitting from the most-work block

Segwit

Taproot

Taproot is an agreed soft fork in the transaction format. The fork adds support for Schnorr signatures, and improves functionality of smart contracts and the Lightning Network. The fork was installed in November 2021. [11] The upgrade adds privacy features. [12] [13] Taproot includes Bitcoin Improvement Proposal numbers BIP340, BIP341, BIP342. [14]

Advantages:

Bitcoin hard forks

Three hard forks were created by "protocol change" definition:

Related Research Articles

Double-spending is the unauthorized production and spending of money, either digital or conventional. It represents a monetary design problem: a good money is verifiably scarce, and where a unit of value can be spent more than once, the monetary property of scarcity is challenged. As with counterfeit money, such double-spending leads to inflation by creating a new amount of copied currency that did not previously exist. Like all increasingly abundant resources, this devalues the currency relative to other monetary units or goods and diminishes user trust as well as the circulation and retention of the currency.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bitcoin</span> Decentralized digital currency

Bitcoin is the first decentralized cryptocurrency. Nodes in the peer-to-peer bitcoin network verify transactions through cryptography and record them in a public distributed ledger, called a blockchain, without central oversight. Consensus between nodes is achieved using a computationally intensive process based on proof of work, called mining, that guarantees the security of the bitcoin blockchain. Mining consumes large quantities of electricity and has been criticized for its environmental impact.

Namecoin is a cryptocurrency originally forked from bitcoin software. It uses proof-of-work algorithm. Like bitcoin, it is limited to 21 million coins.

Litecoin is a decentralized peer-to-peer cryptocurrency and open-source software project released under the MIT/X11 license. Inspired by Bitcoin, Litecoin was among the earliest altcoins, starting in October 2011. In technical details, the Litecoin main chain shares a slightly modified Bitcoin codebase. The practical effects of those codebase differences are lower transaction fees, faster transaction confirmations, and faster mining difficulty retargeting. Due to its underlying similarities to Bitcoin, Litecoin has historically been referred to as the "silver to Bitcoin's gold." In 2022, Litecoin added optional privacy features via soft fork through the MWEB upgrade.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bitcoin protocol</span> Rules that govern the functioning of Bitcoin

The Bitcoin protocol is the set of rules that govern the functioning of Bitcoin. Its key components and principles are: a peer-to-peer decentralized network with no central oversight; the blockchain technology, a public ledger that records all Bitcoin transactions; mining and proof of work, the process to create new bitcoins and verify transactions; and cryptographic security.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">History of bitcoin</span> Cryptocurrency

Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency, a digital asset that uses cryptography to control its creation and management rather than relying on central authorities. Originally designed as a medium of exchange, Bitcoin is now primarily regarded as a store of value. The history of bitcoin started with its invention and implementation by Satoshi Nakamoto, who integrated many existing ideas from the cryptography community. Over the course of bitcoin's history, it has undergone rapid growth to become a significant store of value both on- and offline. From the mid-2010s, some businesses began accepting bitcoin in addition to traditional currencies.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ethereum</span> Open-source blockchain computing platform

Ethereum is a decentralized blockchain with smart contract functionality. Ether is the native cryptocurrency of the platform. Among cryptocurrencies, ether is second only to bitcoin in market capitalization. It is open-source software.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Counterparty (platform)</span> Cryptocurrency platform

Counterparty is a peer-to-peer financial platform and a distributed, open source protocol built on top of the Bitcoin blockchain and network. It was one of the most well-known "Bitcoin 2.0" platforms in 2014, along with Mastercoin, Ethereum, Colored Coins, Ripple and BitShares.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Stellar (payment network)</span> Cryptocurrency

Stellar, or Stellar Lumens, is an open-source, decentralized protocol for digital currency to fiat money low-cost transfers which allows cross-border transactions between any pair of currencies. The Stellar protocol is supported by a Delaware nonprofit corporation, the Stellar Development Foundation, though this organization does not enjoy 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status with the IRS.

A blockchain is a distributed ledger with growing lists of records (blocks) that are securely linked together via cryptographic hashes. Each block contains a cryptographic hash of the previous block, a timestamp, and transaction data. Since each block contains information about the previous block, they effectively form a chain, with each additional block linking to the ones before it. Consequently, blockchain transactions are irreversible in that, once they are recorded, the data in any given block cannot be altered retroactively without altering all subsequent blocks.

Hyperledger is an umbrella project of open source blockchains and related tools that the Linux Foundation started in December 2015. IBM, Intel, and SAP Ariba have contributed to support the collaborative development of blockchain-based distributed ledgers. It was renamed the Hyperledger Foundation in October 2021.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ethereum Classic</span> Blockchain computing platform

Ethereum Classic is a blockchain-based distributed computing platform that offers smart contract (scripting) functionality. It is open source and supports a modified version of Nakamoto consensus via transaction-based state transitions executed on a public Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM).

Bitcoin Unlimited (BU) is a full node implementation for the bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash networks. The Bitcoin Core client, from which Bitcoin Unlimited is forked, has a hard coded one megabyte block limit; Bitcoin Unlimited differs by allowing users to signal which block size limit they prefer, find the limit having a majority consensus and automatically track the largest proof-of-work, regardless of block size. However, if a block greater than one megabyte in size is accepted by Bitcoin Unlimited and rejected by nodes with a block size limit, a fork of the network will occur, resulting in two separate blockchains with Bitcoin Unlimited nodes following the chain with the largest proof-of-work.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lightning Network</span> Payment protocol for Bitcoin

The Lightning Network (LN) is a payment protocol built on the Bitcoin blockchain and those of other cryptocurrencies. It is intended to enable fast transactions among participating nodes and has been proposed as a solution to the bitcoin scalability problem. It is a peer-to-peer system for making micropayments of cryptocurrency through a network of bidirectional payment channels, without delegating custody of funds.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bitcoin scalability problem</span> Scaling problem in bitcoin processing

The Bitcoin scalability problem refers to the limited capability of the Bitcoin network to handle large amounts of transaction data on its platform in a short span of time. It is related to the fact that records in the Bitcoin blockchain are limited in size and frequency.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bitcoin Cash</span> Cryptocurrency that is a fork of Bitcoin

Bitcoin Cash is a cryptocurrency that is a fork of Bitcoin. Bitcoin Cash is a spin-off or altcoin that was created in 2017. In November 2018, Bitcoin Cash split further into two cryptocurrencies: Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin SV.

Segregated Witness, or SegWit, is the name used for an implemented soft fork change in the transaction format of Bitcoin.

EOS.IO is a blockchain protocol based on the cryptocurrency EOS. The smart contract platform claims to eliminate transaction fees and also conduct millions of transactions per second. It was developed by the private company Block.one and launched in 2017. The platform was later released as open-source software.

In blockchain, a fork is defined variously as:

References

Source code

  1. ↑ "bips/bip-0064.mediawiki at master · bitcoin/bips · GitHub". GitHub.
  2. ↑ "bitcoinxt/bitcoinxt". GitHub.
  3. ↑ "bips/bip-0101.mediawiki at master · bitcoin/bips · GitHub". GitHub.
  4. ↑ "Implement hard fork to allow bigger blocks · bitcoinxt/bitcoinxt@946e3ba". GitHub.
  5. ↑ "bitcoinxt/bitcoinxt". GitHub.
  6. ↑ "2MB block size bump by dgenr8 · Pull Request #117 · bitcoinxt/bitcoinxt". GitHub.
  7. ↑ "Bitcoin XT Releases". GitHub . Retrieved 17 June 2018.

Other references

  1. ↑ Antonopoulos, Andreas (2017). Mastering Bitcoin: Programming the Open Blockchain (2 ed.). USA: O' Reilly media, inc. p. Glossary. ISBN   978-1491954386.
  2. ↑ Maria Bustillos (25 August 2015). "Inside the Fight Over Bitcoin's Future". The New Yorker. Conde Naste. Retrieved 7 January 2017.
  3. 1 2 Alex Hern (17 August 2015). "Bitcoin's forked: chief scientist launches alternative proposal for the currency". the Guardian. Retrieved 20 August 2015.
  4. 1 2 3 "A list of Bitcoin forks and how they have changed the network - CNBC TV18". CNBCTV18. 2022-04-29. Retrieved 2024-09-09.
  5. ↑ Tim Hornyak (21 August 2015). "Bitcoin XT debate overshadowing growth opportunities". PC World. IDG. Retrieved 7 January 2017.
  6. ↑ Cade Metz (19 August 2015). "The Bitcoin Schism Shows the Genius of Open Source". WIRED.
  7. ↑ Everett Rosenfeld (20 August 2015). "Bitcoin splits: Will it break, or be better than ever?". CNBC. Retrieved 5 January 2017.
  8. ↑ Paul Vigna (17 January 2016). "Is Bitcoin Breaking Up?". Wall Street Journal.
  9. ↑ "Classic is Back". Archived from the original on 2017-02-02. Retrieved April 28, 2017.
  10. ↑ Ammous, Saifedean (2018). The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking. John Wiley & Sons. pp. 227, 228. ISBN   9781119473893 . Retrieved 23 April 2018.
  11. ↑ Sigalos, MacKenzie (2021-06-09). "Bitcoin just got its first makeover in four years". CNBC. Retrieved 2021-06-15.
  12. ↑ Kharif, Olga (2021-06-15). "Bitcoin to get more privacy features in Taproot update, making it harder to trace payments". Bloomberg. Retrieved 2021-06-23.
  13. ↑ Locke, Taylor (2021-06-14). "7 key things that happened in crypto over the past week". CNBC. Retrieved 2021-06-23.
  14. ↑ "All Bitcoin Improvement Proposals, including BIP340". 2021-06-01 – via GitHub.
  15. ↑ March 2013 Chain Fork
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.