What the Fork!? What Are They And Why do They Happen?

Hey everyone, for the intermediate and advanced crypto users, you'll likely already know enough about what forks are, and why they tend to happen, but since it's been a number of years since we had large fork drama, I figured there are a lot of people who don't know much (if anything) about them.

As we all know, Bitcoin was the first cryptocurrency in the blockchain era. Bitcoin has a 1mb block size and can process 7 transactions per second. In the early years, this was more than enough to keep up with the activity on the network. However, by the time the 2017 bull run was in full effect, a growing number of developers, miners, and users weren't content with the speed of Bitcoin and the network fees to process transactions. On August 1st, 2017 after a lot of arguing over these issues, that group of devs, miners and users that protested for a block size limit increase to 32mb blocks forked Bitcoin and began their own chain with the protocol of 32mb blocks, and it was named Bitcoin Cash.

Ok, now WHAT is a fork? What was done with the creation of Bitcoin Cash is called a hard fork (there is a soft fork which I'll define later) which is a change in the protocol which essentially splits the chain into two separate branches, each becoming their own from the point of the protocol integration. Creating these forks utilizing different block sizes is each groups way to (hopefully) create increased transaction capacity and speed while maintaining the core level of security and decentralization that Bitcoin is known for.

Soft forks on the other hand are an update to the protocol where only the previous valid blocks are made invalid, and more importantly, they do NOT split the chain creating a new coin.

As luck would have it, even the 32mb block sizes were not enough for a portion of the Bitcoin Cash community and once again, drama ensued between developers, miners and users of the chain. On November 15th, 2018, the Bitcoin Cash blockchain underwent a hard fork to change the protocol to 128mb blocks over the BCH's 32mb blocks, thus created Bitcoin Satoshi's Vision, or BSV.

BSV comes with it's own theatrics being led by Craig Wright, the self-proclaimed (and never proven) Satoshi Nakamoto. All of that is for another discussion, however, if you'd like to flame him in the comments, feel free!

Also, did you know that even ETH is also a fork? Many of you do know, but Ethereum Classic was actually the first Ethereum, and due to a monstrous (at the time) hack in 2016 where millions of dollars of ETH were stolen, ETH (now ETC) underwent a hard fork to reverse the hack on the blockchain and return the stolen ETH to its owners while creating the ETH chain we all use (and mostly love) today. Pretty wild, huh?

Many many many coins are also created by hard forking, but I wanted to focus on Bitcoin and ETH which had reasons beyond "I want to create a new coin" to fork.

Now you know what hard and soft forks are, and why we have multiple variants of Bitcoin and Ethereum.