Two major Bitcoin Forks are Bitcoin Cash (BCH) and Bitcoin Satoshi Vision (SV) rose a little but ultimately failed to convince the market of their status. Currently, BCH is sitting at around #20 in the charts and is now worth less than 8% of its starting valuation of around $6k. BSV on the other hand is #61 in the charts while Bitcoin Gold (BTG), an obscure token with many issues is now ranked #117. Both cryptocurrencies’ importance is slowly decreasing over time. That is for sure.
Bitcoin is based on a consensus-based network. This means that the Bitcoin nodes and then the mining community have to agree on any potential updates through a consensus or risk forking the system. So, the whole network has to come together and agree on an update to fix an issue or make it better. Back in 2017, Bitcoin had a major disagreement about a system update. Some section of the mining community and the nodes announced their move to enable an update that the community wasn’t getting along with. They eventually decided to fork away from the main chain with a new cryptocurrency called Bitcoin Cash.
Many argue that the update was just a lame reason and this rebel group wanted to create another Bitcoin chain to get access to free tokens that come with it. Essentially, all Bitcoin holders were accredited with the same number of BCH tokens as a whole new network with the same transactional history was being created.
At the time, most of the community was against this move as they believed it would weaken the main chain and for Bitcoin to succeed, this new chain needed to be discarded. Various cryptocurrency exchanges and wallet providers initially refused to provide the equivalent amount BCH tokens to BTC holders. There were also a wide range of other smaller issues after the fork in September 2017. But, to some experts’ surprise, Bitcoin Cash made a name for itself and remained relevant for a long time. It occupied the #4 cryptocurrency spot.
The relative success of Bitcoin Fork BCH prompted the fork enthusiasts to go on another series of adventures. Bitcoin Cash eventually split into two forks itself; Bitcoin Cash ABC (later renamed back to BCH) and Bitcoin SV. The main chain also got another smaller fork called Bitcoin Gold. Both BCH and BSV saw some decent performances in between. However, this year around, they have been very poor overall with Bitcoin Cash slipping from around #15 to as low #25 and BSV slipping from around #20 to as low as #61. BTG is even further down the pecking order.
It is hard to imagine that all three Bitcoin networks once occupied the Top 1,3 and 4 positions in the crypto charts. But, the market has spoken and eventually the experts have been proven right; Bitcoin forks will eventually lose value. This has discouraged naysayers to withdraw other forking scenarios in the near future.
Image Source: flickr.com
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