Hi steemians,
It is the last week of this season's engagement challenge and I'm so delighted to be among those participating in this week's contest. This week the topic is Blockchain Forks and I will be attempting the questions below in response to the contest. Let's get started.

The word fork in blockchain technology is a term used whenever there seems to be any form of change in the protocol of blockchain technology. We know that blockchain today is used in almost every aspect of our daily lives ranging from finance, medicals etc., hence the need to always improve it to meet the demands of the people.

Most times, there tends to be some sort of modification needed to meet the demand of the people and that change is what we call the blockchain fork. Developers of the blockchain always sort for ways to make the blockchain more user-friendly and also to ease every process and when they come up to implement these changes, we call it a blockchain fork.

Since blockchain is an open-source code different developers can make modifications to suit their test without affecting others, blockchain forks are of two categories I.e soft fork and hard fork. There are cases, where the developers may not necessarily reach a consensus agreement between themselves before a change will be made on the blockchain.

This is because some may prefer the way everything is functioning at the moment whereas others will need a change to suit their activities. In this regard, the blockchain fork can take place with two existing protocols I.e the new and the old chain.

As I have earlier stated above, blockchain forks happen to improve the functionalities I.e either the security, scalability, transparency etc of the blockchain which gives users more confidence and assurance that their data is well kept.

When we talk about a hard fork in the blockchain, we are referring to a scenario where the proposed change to be carried out in the blockchain is not accepted by all. This means that a group of developers will accept the new change whereas another part of the developers won't accept the changes. When this happens, it will result in a disagreement between the sets of developers leading to the formation of separate blockchains in which one will be the former existing and the other a new one.

Having understood what a hard fork is all about, let's see a scenario where this occurred for more clarification. As I have stated above, many reasons can lead to a blockchain fork and one of them is scalability.

In the case of our dear number one crypto asset I.e BTC, it has a block size of 1 megabyte and its transaction speed is about 7 TPS. A proposal was made by Mike Hearn to increase the block size from 1 megabyte to 8 megabytes and the transaction speed from about 7 TPS to about 24 TPS. This gave rise to Bitcoin XT in 2014. This protocol of the blockchain didn't stay long because many didn't accept it hence it died off.

In 2017, we had another hard fork which lead to the creation of Bitcoin cash. Here, the developers seek to increase the block size from 1 megabyte to 2 megabytes. A whole lot of nodes accepted this change unlike the case of XT which didn't receive acceptance from many nodes which lead to its death. Today the Bitcoin Cash hard fork gave us the BCH crypto asset. The screenshot below was taken from the coin market cap.

When we talk about a soft fork in the blockchain, we are referring to a scenario where there is an upgrade in the blockchain software which does not necessarily create a separate chain. What this means is that there will be some features that will be upgraded in which even if you decide to use the old version you are still allowed just that the new functionalities added won't be visible to you until you have updated it.

A clear example of the soft fork is the regular updates we see every 2 or 3 weeks on the binance platform. These updates are mostly done to ensure your security but whether or not you do it, you still have access to perform your transaction effective. But if you do it, the new features added to the app will be visible to you for use.

An example of the soft fork is the segregated witness (SegWit) which took place in the bitcoin blockchain. The essence of this update is to separate or remove the signature of the witness from the block as it is seen as something occupying space where transactions are supposed to be stored. This update helps to free up more space and also makes storage of transactions more faster and effective I.e more transactions are then stored in a faster way on the bitcoin blockchain.

This implies that the nodes that are upgraded store more transactions in a faster way than those nodes that are not upgraded. Though the upgraded ones only store transactions without storing the signature of the witness whereas the older version which has not received an upgrade stores both witness's signature and transaction. The upgraded stores have more transactions than the ones not upgraded.

The steemit platform was in existence since 2016and it has been working as a decentralized social media platform that rewards content creators with their native token called steem and SBD. In 2020, there was an integration of the TRX and Steemit where it is aimed to give steemains more rewards. Today we see that steemians earn in both Steem, SBD and TRX.

This integration didn't go so well with lots of developers hence there was no agreement among them and that led to a hard fork of creating the hive blockchain on March 2020. The aim of the platform is still the same as a blogging platform that rewards content creators. But since this is a hard fork an entirely different token was created for the new chain which is the Hive token and HBD.

From the genesis block of both Steemit and Hive, we can see that both of block 1 are identical. From the screenshots below the witness, timestamp, virtual operations, transaction etc are all the same. This is because at this stage hive has not started producing blocks and that is why the block information of that of steem is utilised in both.

The difference in these blocks is seen when both have separated and work independently of each other. Let's take block number 61,000,000 as a case study. From the screenshot below, you will notice that the witness, timestamp, virtual operations, transaction etc are all different because at this stage hive blockchain is working independently fromm the steem blockchain.

Forking has to do with changes in the software to meet the need of the people at any point in time. We have two different types of blockchain forking which are the soft fork and the hard fork. The soft fork has to do with an upgrade to better the working of the system whereas the hard fork has to do with separation or splitting the chains into two and all of them being independent of each other hence all have their tokens.