For a limited time, get a reward when you download the Trust wallet! You don't need to make any transactions with it, just download and set it up. Do that here and claim your free reward!
Hello guys, and welcome to another post.
In one of my recent posts, I explained what a hard fork is in very simple English. That post kind of blew up, and some people asked for a similar post on what a soft fork is. So here we are.
Let's get started!
First off, you can read my hard fork post here. It's really entertaining!
Ok, shameless self promotion aside, what is a soft fork really?
Well, a soft fork is simply "an update to an existing protocol which is backward compatible".
"What? In English please!"You say.
Well, picture this.
You update your computer hardware(let's say that for some strange reason, you're still on Windows Vista.)to the latest version of Windows 10.
Not all of your apps would run on this new operating system, because Windows 10 isn't backward compatible with many of those ancient apps.
So we can say that the apps that DO run after the update are backward compatible, and those represent a "soft fork". The ones that no longer run have lost their compatibility, and are referred to as "hard forked".
But this post is about soft forks, so let's digress.
Think of a soft fork as a lighter form of a hard fork. If you bought a cryptocurrency after a soft fork, chances are that if you have your private keys, you can still get some of the soft forked crypto along with your regular crypto.
But should you have bought into a cryptocurrency after a hard fork, there is no going back.
A soft fork can therefore be seen as a temporary-ish change to existing protocols. This change can be reversed should the need arise, but it hardly ever does.
A classic example of a soft fork is the Muir Glacier fork on the Ethereum blockchain. It happened recently and really affected the price of Ether for a while after its occurrence.
Equally, a soft fork may or may not create a new cryptocurrency, while a hard fork must create a new cryptocurrency for it to be deemed a hard fork.
That's basically all there is to know about softforks.
Thanks for reading, and don't forget to claim your free TWT tokens using the first link in this post! If you missed the link, here it is again. You're welcome.😉
