Who's Afraid of the Bitcoin Hard Fork?

Bitcoin is a digital asset held in carefully crafted code. But sometimes, pressures to change the code lead to a so-called “hard fork,” after which two new blockchains may also fork and coexist - and in some cases, openly compete.

A rose is a rose is a rose - unless it is not. The name of Bitcoin has a certain mystique; it has become a story, an entity and a lot of hopes and investments hang upon it. At this point, Bitcoin is an established digital asset with record market prices above $7,000 - and just as it’s at its most influential, Bitcoin faces an identity crisis.

Planned or Accidental Forks?

The identity crisis follows a series of planned hard forks- irreversible updates to the Bitcoin Code that also create new blockchains. Those new blockchains are not blank - unlike altcoins that copy Bitcoin from the genesis block, these chains fork at a higher block and hold the whole transaction history of Bitcoin until that moment. Having a common history also means that owners of assets on the original chain end up owning a brand-new altcoin of the same amount.

Undergoing a hard fork is not a problem for Bitcoin - think of it as a software update. If it is agreed upon and greeted, it would cause no trouble.

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