Hello Crypto friends,

Once again I appear before you all in attempt t the wonderful engagement challenge hosted by the steemit crypto academy.

Before I proceed, I will love to encourage and express my gratitude to the hard-working moderators of the steemit crypto academy.

This week, we shall be discussing deeply on fork and it's Importance, please follow along as we begin.

USING YOUR OWN TERMS TO DEFINE WHAT IS A FORK IN GENERAL?

A fork can be explained to be what happens in a blockchain when the blockchain attempts to diverge into two potential path or when there is a change in protocol.

It can also be explained to be an instant in a blockchain when there is about to be a change of rules in the blockchain.

I personally understand blockchain fork to be the transfer of information from an existing chain to a new chain, more or less like when a blockchain diverges into two and the old one continues functioning.

It is a terminology that is used when there is about to be an upgrade in the software of a blockchain.

The primary goal of a blockchain fork is to improve the capability of a network

A blockchain fork can only be achieved because of the decentralized nature of the blockchain, it possesses an open source code that can be modified by its developers who tried to adjust its operational functionalities to the need of it's community.

USING ANY BLOCKCHAIN EXAMPLE, EXPLAIN WHAT A HARD FORK IS.

A hard fork as it relates to a blockchain technology can be explained to be a change in a network's protocol that makes previously invalid transactions and block valid.
It can also make previously valid blocks and transaction invalid.

A hard fork usually requires the upgrade of all nodes to the latest version of the software

For proper understanding, a hard fork can be explained to be when the nodes of the newest version of the blockchain is no longer compatible with that of the previous version blockchain

Whenever a hard fork is crested, there is usually a creation of new tokens, new rules and mode of operations

AN EXAMPLE OF HARDFORK

A nice example of an hardfork is that of ethereum merge, a migration from pow to pos concensus mechanism.

When compared to pow, pos mechanism is known to be more energy conservative.
The Ethereum merge occurred in the 15th of September 2022 and this saw the connection of a new consensus mechanism known as beacon chain into the Ethereum virtual machine.

The hard-fork transition was splited into two processes the first which occurs on December 2020, which saw the creation and test running of the beacon chain.

The complete transition was the recent one that just occurred which saw the merge of the layer of the beacon chain to Ethereum virtual machine.

USING ANY BLOCKCHAIN EXAMPLE, EXPLAIN WHAT A SOFT FORK IS.

A blockchain soft fork can be explained to be a change in the software protocol in which only previously valid transaction blocks are made invalid.

This usually occur because the old node will identify the new block as a valid one, a soft fork is usually backwards compatible.

This kind of fork only need a large population of the miners to upgrade and enforce new rules, unlike the hard-fork that requires an upgrade from all nodes and total agreement on the new version.

New transaction types can most oftentimes be added as soft fork,l with the requirement that the miners and participants understand the transaction type.

This is usually done by making the new transaction to appear to older clients as a "pay-to-nobody" financial transaction, and to influence the miners into agreeing to reject blocks alongside these transactions until it complies with the new rules.

A soft fork sometimes occur due to temporary divergence on a blockchain whenever miners with a non-upgraded node violates a rule of the new node.

EXAMPLE OF SOFTFORK

A good example of soft fork is the segregated witness upgrade that was carried out on bitcoin blockchain.

This softfork was developed by pieter wiulle in the year 2015.
The high rate of scalability of bitcoin blockchain led to this upgrade
It was noticed that the queue of transactions kept increasing.

To counter this Challenge, an idea of a new transaction type was introduced by the developers.

This new transaction type requires no witness signature, thus increasing the number of transactions that can be embedded in a block.

In the year 2017, the segregated witness upgrade was introduced to bitcoin blockchain but due to the fact that it wasn't fully accepted by the whole team, this led to the creation of bitcoin cash blockchain.

WHAT ARE THE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN HARD FORKS AND SOFT FoYrks?

Below is a tabular difference between a hard fork and a soft fork

HARD FORK	SOFT FORK
It treats the old transaction block as invalid	it treats the new and old transaction block as valid.
It leads to the formation of new tokens	it doesn't require the formation of new tokens
It most times results to the creation of new blockchain after it's changes has been done	It doesn't lead to the formation of new blockchain.
It's changes is not always approved by every validator member in the chain	Every validator member approves of it's changes.
It's creation are usually reversible	It's creation are irreversible

EXPLAIN THE STEEM AND HIVE HARD FORK BY SHOWING THE SIMILARITIES/DIFFERENCES IN THEIR GENESIS BLOCKS.

An hard fork was experienced by steem blockchain after it's software source code underwent a major upgrade.

This hard fork led to the creation of a new blockchain known as the Hive blockchain.

Hive and steem blockchain tend to share the same history blocks but treat the previous transaction blocks from each blockchain as invalid.

Steem blockchain hard fork started after the integration of trx token as part of the token of steem blockchain, and this led to some reactions amongst the community witnesses and some users of the blockchain.

This disagreement then led to the development and migration of some users and witnesses from steem blockchain to hive blockchain.

Similar to steem blockchain, the hive blockchain also has its native tokens which we know as Hive, Hive Backed Dollar ( HBD), and Hive Power (HP).

The similarities between the two blockchain has a peculiar depth, with the same layout and mode of operation and just a little difference of color.

Steemit possess the same previous history and this can easily be confirmed from their genesis block.

Follow along please as we make a quick exploration of Steem and hive genesis block.

Steem genesis block

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Hive Genesis Block

The above screenshot of steem and hive blockchain shows the details of the common details shared between them.

It is shown above that both blockchain shares same hash, same time of transaction and same witness in their genesis block.

CONCLUSION

A fork is a very important term in the crypto space as it usually occur when a blockchain is about to be split into two.

There are two types of blockchain fork which we know as the soft fork and hard fork, and we have examined the differences between them.

I appreciate the host of this contest for their hardwork in hosting this contest.

I wish you all a wonderful break ahead.