Coin Fork & Development

Coin fork

Coin forks are defined variantly as changes in the protocol of the bitcoin network or as the situations that occur “when two or more blocks have the same block height”. A fork influences the validity of the rules.A “fork” is a change to the software of the digital currency that creates two separate versions of the blockchain with a shared history.

Forks can be temporary, lasting for a few minutes, or can be a permanent split in the network creating two separate versions of the blockchain. When this happens, two different digital currencies are also created.

Coin fork currently supports 3 digital currencies — Bitcoin, Ethereum and Litecoin. Each of these digital currencies use open-source software protocols with independent development teams responsible for changes and improvements to the network, much in the same way that changes to internet protocols allow web browsing to become better over time.

Our mission is to create an open financial system for the world and we believe digital currencies will be fundamental in achieving this mission. However, many of these digital currencies are still in early development. Making improvements to the software — such as the number of transactions the network can support — is crucial to creating finance 2.0.

How Do coinfork Transactions Work?

Bitcoin was introduced by an unknown man/woman/group going by the pseudonym, Satoshi Nakamoto in their, now legendary, research paper “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System”. What bitcoin provided was a peer-to-peer decentralized, digital currency system. The entire system of bitcoin functions due to the work done by a group of people called “miners”.

So what do these miners do? The two biggest activities that they do are:

  • Mining for blocks.
  • Adding transactions to the blocks.

Mining for Blocks

All the miners use their computing power to look for new blocks to add to the blockchain The process follows the “proof of work” protocol and once a new block has been discovered, the miners responsible for the discovery get a reward, currently set at 12.5 bitcoins (it is halved after every 210,000 blocks), however, this isn’t the only incentive that the miners have.

Adding Transactions to the Blocks

When a group of miners discovers and mine a new a new block, they become temporary dictators of that block.

Our policy is to support only one version of a digital currency. In order to determine which fork to support we look at factors such as size of the network, market value and customer demand. We make this decision carefully because safely supporting a new digital currency requires significant work for many teams.

We will keep users informed about these events through our blog, status page, twitter and supported assets page.