There are times when the development team for a cryptocurrency starts to have diverging opinions on what is the best long term vision for the project. If the differences between the two groups cannot be reconciled, one group will separate from the other, and implement changes to the software code that they feel will ultimately strengthen it.
In layman's terms, one can think of a hard fork as a backwards-incompatible software upgrade. The issue is that not everyone wants to perform the upgrade, since some feel the upgraded code is inferior to the existing code.
As a result, the blockchain splits, creating two separate networks: one with the old rules, and one with the new rules, - Binance Academy
A fellow author put it eloquently this way:
...a hard fork creates two separate networks by splitting an existing one. Two ledgers with the same past and different futures, - @MoreGainStrategies
After the hard fork takes place, owners of the pre-forked cryptocurrency are eligible to collect the new cryptocurrency that resulted on a 1:1 basis. The pre-forked cryptocurrency would need to be placed into a crypto wallet that supports the hard fork.
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Last modified November 6, 2020
Follow me on Twitter: @CryptoWordsmith
Lead image by loufre (modified by the author) from Pixabay
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There is so much to learn about cryptocurrency, this made me realized that I.m still in my kindergarten level I guess :)