For anyone that hasn’t been living under a rock (unless that dark, solitary space has wifi), you have probably heard the words “fork” and “Bitcoin” being used together in sentences an awful lot lately. If you’re just dipping a toe in the crypto universe, you’re probably second guessing yourself since you just thought you wrapped your head around Bitcoin.

“Ok, so it’s a trustless, secure, decentralized, open, censorship resistant, borderless currency that’s… edible? That can’t be it! Can it? Maybe I just receive a commemorative fork from my exchange for holding my Bitcoin there? I wonder when Coinbase is shipping that Bitcoin Gold fork I heard about. Hmm… Probably just Gold plated though, can’t imagine it’s solid gold. Although, Bitcoin does seem pretty expensive! I better check my email for a tracking number.”

Hard Forking: A brief explanation

One of the most powerful things about a good CryptoCurrency (not all share this trait and you should be wary of those that do not) is its OPEN nature. Open means that the code is available publicly, for anyone to go and review it, test, and, most importantly to this discussion, change.

In a normal market, companies compete for the most talented individuals to join their team and improve on their products and services. In this closed system, one company pools all their talent and resources to work on their own proprietary product while their competitors simultaneously do the same. The result, marginal improvements and stifled innovation.

But imagine having all those great minds from all those companies working together for the BEST solution. Essentially, this is what we have in Bitcoin and the Open Source Cryptocurrency space. The collective power of humanity comes together here, sharing all problems and solutions openly. The pace of innovation has always been hindered by lack of communication and closed systems. With the advent of these open technologies, we are no longer standing on the shoulders of giants, we ARE the giant.

So what does this have to do with forking? In the process of this constant innovation, many brilliant minds have different solutions to the many problems we are faced with. Sometimes, a proposed solution is quickly embraced by the community because a vast majority agree on its merits. Other times, the solution is not so clear. And so there is a difference of opinion that sometimes reaches an impasse. When this happens, the person (or group) proposing the solution may decide that they are going to pursue their solution, regardless of external support.

And so, to simplify: If I believe I have a way to improve Bitcoin, I would copy the open source (freely available) codebase and will make the changes I would like to see implemented, and then credit all current Bitcoin holders with my new and (hypothetically) improved Bitcoin, which, for arguments sake, we’ll call Bitcoin B.

But why not just create my own, totally new Cryptocurrency from scratch? Because, one of the most valuable and powerful things about Bitcoin is its network effect. As the first mover in the space, and also the most trusted and secure, it has the largest global community with whom I would like to interact, and, ultimately, have become part of my new network.

Ok so you have a solution and I have a solution, whichever one the majority of people choose to use, wins, right? Sounds like a pretty straightforward approach to improvement. A little old-fashioned “May the best man win” competition. So why all the fuss? Seems like a lot of negativity going around for people who should all be working on finding the best solutions to common problems. Twitter has essentially become a daily battle to the death that you might expect to find in Roman times at the Colosseum. The problem is that network support is crucial for long term success, and so everyone is vying to hold and gain ground in the intergalactic Bitcoin network wars. No comment on who represents the Empire or the Resistance, although this tweet may have given us a clue as to who Darth Vadar is.

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A New Hope (Ok, promise no more Star Wars references).

A Fresh Approach

Since 2015, Achain (ACT), a company based in China, has been working on an exciting and innovative new approach to the forking dilemma. They actually WANT you to fork their chain! As many times as your heart desires. That’s right. Fork away!

Their concept is really interesting. They make it easy for anyone to fork their main chain (Achain) and make changes that best suit the needs of their particular use case.

Realizing that everyone has something unique that is most important to them, they encourage the creation of industry or use case specific changes to their main protocol. A bespoke chain, if you will.

All of these ancillary chains also connect to, and settle on the main chain (not unlike 2nd layer scaling solutions for Bitcoin). In this way, ACT hopes to empower the entire network to get exactly what they want, while still keeping the integrity and benefits of having a large, powerful network intact. One big community, all having access to a variety of tokens that specialize in different areas of need, but that are all ultimately interconnected. Sounds like a pretty good idea.

Perhaps the most interesting part of this concept is how they are integrating it with the Bitcoin network. Recently, Zclassic (ZCL) became one of the first to introduce combining their already proven technology (privacy) with Bitcoin gold. Thus, taking the best of both in order to form Bitcoin Private. After the announcement, ZCL skyrocketed over an incredible 2,700% to over $100, signifying strong demand for this non-contentious approach.

AchainOfficial is on track to do the same on Jan 12, when they will be crediting their holders 1:1 with their own new fork called Abitcoin, or ABTC. ABTC will inherit ACT’s DPOS (delegated proof of stake) protocol that promises huge improvements in TPS (transactions per second), massively increasing throughput, reducing transaction fees, and reducing energy consumption. All major problems facing current blockchain protocols. According to their website, this will enable ABTC to be at the forefront of emerging industries, such as Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, Gaming, and the Internet of Things (IOT). All of which are trying to find a “blockchain home” that will enable them to realize their full potential.

As of this writing, ACT is currently trading at $.71 cents. Could we see a similarly crazy price spike in ACT as we saw in ZCL? Chinese coins have been absolutely on fire lately after being ignored in large part to the regulatory scare in September. Investors are no longer turning a blind eye to these companies as recent runs in NEO, QTUM, ITC, TRX, VEN and many others can attest. Only time will tell, but the next week should be a very interesting time to be keeping an eye on ACT.

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