Since it was introduced to the general public, there has hardly been a time when Bitcoin has not been the centre of some kind of controversy or speculation. All crypto enthusiasts would know that the original team has—at multiple occasions—parted ways because of differences launching their own modified Btc. In crypto terminologies, this has been named hard fork.

In this pool of multiple Bitcoins, understanding which one is which is sure to give you a headache. In this piece, we are going to list 13 hard Forks, across two parts, why they happened, and how they are currently performing in the market.

Let’s begin by looking at the current state of the coin.

Bitcoin (BTC): The first cryptocurrency introduced to the world by Satoshi Nakamoto with the aim of decentralising the financial landscape. It is primarily a consensus network powered by its users with zero central authority. BTC was launched in the year 2009.

Currently, the BTC stats look like this:

Now, let’s move on to understand how some of their more popular forks are doing.

CLAMS (CLAM)—May 2014

Occurring in May 2014, CLAM was a fork that was based on implementing the PoS algorithm on a decentralised network. CLAMS only exist in the network and therefore cannot be taxed. The network offers a block time of 1 minute.

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BitCore (BTX)—April 2017

BitCore is based on the BTC code but with a new genesis block. The network credits 0.5 BCX for every 1 BTC held at the fork block. The team created a new chain so as to keep their blockchain super-tiny with less than 400 MB in size.

The network wanted to solve the problems relating to transaction time and block size. The network claims to offer a 10 MB block size with 2.5-minute transaction speed—both better than the previous forks.

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Bitcoin Cash (BCH)—August 2017

Bitcoin Cash was created to deal with the increasing number of people becoming users of the orginal blockchain. The BTC community split over what the ideal size of a block should be. BCH was created to offer a two-time increase in the block size. The aim of Bitcoin Cash was to make the blockchain more scalable.

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Bitcoin Gold (BTG)—November 2017

Created on October 2017, Bitcoin Gold wanted to restore the GPU mining algorithm to make the blockchain decentralised again. This came from the motivation to alter the miner centralisation by changing the consensus mechanism making them resistant to the ASIC hardware.

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Bitcoin Diamond (BCD)—November 2017

The Bitcoin Diamond was created with the aim of implementing the PoS algorithm instead of PoW. The prime difference between Bitcoin Diamond and Bitcoin is that the hard-fork multiplied the original supply by a factor of 10. The network intended to solve the problems of slow transaction speeds (by allegedly implementing an 8MB block size) and a high threshold for new members.

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Bitcoin Private (BTCP)—February 2018

Bitcoin Private is basically a co-fork of Bitcoin and Zclassic which was created with the intention of adding privacy to the bitcoin blockchain. To achieve this, the Bitcoin Private network uses a larger block size, a shorter block time, and a GPU friendly PoW algorithm for mining—Equihash.

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Hitesh Malviya

Hitesh Malviya is the Founder of ItsBlockchain. He is one of the most early adopters of blockchain & cryptocurrency enthusiast in India. After being into space for a few years, he started IBC in 2016 to help other early adopters learn about the technology.
Before IBC, Hitesh has founded 4 companies in the cyber security & IT space.