What is soft forks and hard forks ?

 If you are interested in cryptocurrencies, you've probably heard of something called a fork. We've seen a few hard forks already, but what are they exactly?

 Before we can take a look at what a hard fork is, you must understand how a blockchain works. In this content, I will use Bitcoin as the primary example, but all these concepts apply to other cryptocurrencies as well. As you probably know, Bitcoin is a digital currency, and that means that it is implemented with a lot of software. The software is called the Bitcoin Protocol, and it establishes the rules to which everyone should agree if they want to use Bitcoin. This includes how large a block is, what rewards miners get, how fees are calculated, and so on and so on. But just like any other software project, development on Bitcoin will never be fully finished. There is always room for improvement. Bitcoin developers regularly push out updates to fix issues or to increase performance.

 Some of these improvements are small, but others fundamentally change the way Bitcoin works. So sometimes it happens that a group of developers disagrees with the direction that Bitcoin is taking. The miners can also disagree because updates to the Bitcoin protocol could reduce their profits. If a group of people are so dissatisfied, they can choose to go their own way and create their own version of the protocol and fork the blockchain. So what happens if they do this? while Bitcoin consists out of two big pieces, the Bitcoin protocol and the blockchain, which stores all the transactions that have ever happened?

 If they decide to create their own fork, they start by copying the Bitcoin protocol code and start making their changes. They can do this because Bitcoin is completely open source. After they have implemented their desired changes, they define a point in time at which their fork will become active. This is done by specifying a block number. For example, you can say that your block will go live when block #480,000 is published through the blockchain. When that block number is reached, the community is split in two. Some people decide to support the original protocol, while others want to support the fork.

 Each group then starts adding new blocks to the fork that they want to support. At this point, both blockchains are incompatible with each other. Because the fork is based on the original blockchain, all transactions that happened on the original blockchain also happened on the fork. And that means that if you had a certain amount of coins before the fork, you will also get the same amount of the new currency. Some people call this free money, but it all depends on whether or not the fork can actually attract value. We've already seen quite a few hard forks. For example, it happened to Bitcoin on August 1st, 2017 when Bitcoin Cash was born.

 In this case, the developers couldn't agree on what the size for a block should be. Some wanted the block size to go from one MB to 2 megabytes, but others wanted to increase it even further. When matters couldn't be settled, both groups decided to go their own way. Bitcoin has had a few hard forks already, some forks becoming more successful than others, but it's not the only one. Also, Ethereum had a hard fork when it was split into Ethereum and Ethereum classic.

 So that is essentially what a hard fork is. But there is also something called a soft fork. So what's the difference?

 A hard fork occurs when someone forks Bitcoin and makes it incompatible with the original. If you, however, fork Bitcoin and make your changes compatible, then we call it a soft fork. A subtle difference. So now you know what a hard fork is and why they happen. Because cryptocurrencies are becoming more and more popular, it's safe to say that disagreements will pop up more often and more forks will be created. So that was it for this whole article. Thanks for reading the entire article.