If you have been around the Bitcoin and cryptocurrency industry long enough, then the term “fork” will not be new to you. But hearing about them, and understanding them are two different ball games. So we set out to give you an overview of Litecoin forks, taking a look at how they happened and the reasons behind them.
The term “fork” is used to describe a situation when a particular blockchain diverges into two paths. This could happen when the entire blockchain community decides to adopt a new way of doing things, or a segment of the community chooses to break away from the old protocol.
There are two types of Blockchain forks, hard forks and soft forks. During a hard fork, all the nodes participating in a blockchain network must upgrade to a new protocol in order to remain relevant. Failing to do so would leave such nodes on an entirely different blockchain with distinct capabilities.
On the other hand, during a soft fork, nodes are also required to upgrade their software, but this does not necessarily make those who don’t, invalid. They all remain within the same network, and each node can still validate transactions. The only difference is that the two sets of nodes will work differently on the network, with varying capabilities.
Now, let us take a proper look at an overview of Litecoin forks as stated above:
Even Litecoin itself is a fork of Bitcoin which came into existence in October 2011. The brain behind Litecoin is Charlie Lee, who used to be an employee at Google, and former Engineering Director at Coinbase. Litecoin was forked off of the Bitcoin network in order to create a similar cryptocurrency but with an improvement in the speed of transactions. Hence it had the nickname, “faster Bitcoin”. Here is what Lee has to say about Litecoin:
"My vision is that people would use Litecoin every day to buy things. It would just be the payment method of choice."
Down the road, members of the Litecoin community saw reasons to also create newer cryptocurrencies for other reasons and implementations. That is how the forks that we are about to discuss all came into existence.
https://medium.com/@official_83664/an-overview-of-litecoin-forks-b66bd43ec3f8
The term “fork” is used to describe a situation when a particular blockchain diverges into two paths. This could happen when the entire blockchain community decides to adopt a new way of doing things, or a segment of the community chooses to break away from the old protocol.
There are two types of Blockchain forks, hard forks and soft forks. During a hard fork, all the nodes participating in a blockchain network must upgrade to a new protocol in order to remain relevant. Failing to do so would leave such nodes on an entirely different blockchain with distinct capabilities.
On the other hand, during a soft fork, nodes are also required to upgrade their software, but this does not necessarily make those who don’t, invalid. They all remain within the same network, and each node can still validate transactions. The only difference is that the two sets of nodes will work differently on the network, with varying capabilities.
Now, let us take a proper look at an overview of Litecoin forks as stated above:
Even Litecoin itself is a fork of Bitcoin which came into existence in October 2011. The brain behind Litecoin is Charlie Lee, who used to be an employee at Google, and former Engineering Director at Coinbase. Litecoin was forked off of the Bitcoin network in order to create a similar cryptocurrency but with an improvement in the speed of transactions. Hence it had the nickname, “faster Bitcoin”. Here is what Lee has to say about Litecoin:
"My vision is that people would use Litecoin every day to buy things. It would just be the payment method of choice."
Down the road, members of the Litecoin community saw reasons to also create newer cryptocurrencies for other reasons and implementations. That is how the forks that we are about to discuss all came into existence.
https://medium.com/@official_83664/an-overview-of-litecoin-forks-b66bd43ec3f8
