In the field of cryptocurrency, in addition to the rampant initial coin offering (ICO), another confusing thing should be considered fork. According to a recent study published by BitMEX Research, the Bitcoin blockchain alone has seen 44 forks since last August. In other words, Bitcoin has spawned at least 44 forked coins.
On August 1, 2017, Bitcoin Cash (Bitcoin Cash/BCash) became the first hard fork of the Bitcoin blockchain. At that time, there was a huge controversy in the Bitcoin community over the integration of the Segregated Witness function, and then the Bitcoin Cash hard fork appeared.
Afterwards, Bitcoin forks began to become unstoppable, and a series of forked coins appeared. Not only that, the naming of these forked coins is almost irregular, just adding some random words you can imagine next to the three words of Bitcoin-for example, Bitcoin Candy (Bitcoin Candy), Bitcoin Bitcoin Pizza, Bitcoin God, Bitcoin Faith, Bitcoin Diamond, Bitcoin Gold, Bitcoin Atom, and more.
However, most Bitcoin forks not only have a low penetration and application rate, but also have a disastrous transaction volume. According to data from CoinMarketCap, a well-known cryptocurrency data website, there are currently only four Bitcoin forks with a 24-hour transaction volume of more than $100,000, namely Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin Diamond, Bitcoin Gold and Bitcoin Privacy. (Bitcoin Private).
Bitcoins software is open source, and hard forks occur when developers clone the Bitcoin blockchain by modifying the original code to create new blockchains and cryptocurrencies.
Ideally, the goal of a hard fork is to make technical improvements on the existing blockchain, but it seems that most of the forked coins launched are just trying to borrow the Bitcoin name to make a quick profit, rather than in the community. Any major advances in blockchain technology.
Of course, some still want to continue using the old Bitcoin blockchain consensus protocol.
George Kimionis, CEO of Coinomi, said in an interview with Bloomberg:
“Unfortunately, the vast majority of bitcoin-based hard forks we see today have the sole purpose of making money. We may be years from now realizing that these cryptocurrency price increases have blinded investors eyes, they are not seriously contributing to the cryptocurrency ecosystem.”
If the current trend continues, perhaps we will soon see Bitcoin Butter, Bitcoin Chicken Nuggets, and Bitcoin Salad and other weirder Bitcoin forks.
