According to Lex Sokolin, a director of fintech company Autonomous Research, Bitcoin forks could increase up to 50 this year from 19 forks last year.
Forks are different protocols from the main chain, which try to improve the original string by adding more features or a few more tweaks. It is an alternative to raising money through an initial coin offering. In which a startup raises funds by selling new tokens. About $3.7 billion was allocated last year from ICOs.
While some forks are considering by a genuine concern to improve profits. Since many targets at making earnings by earning publicity from the use of the original chain name.
“Unfortunately, most fork-based projects we see today are more of a sheer money grab. Looking back a few years from now we might realize that they were just mutations fostered by investors blinded by numerical price increases. Rather than honest attempts to contribute to the blockchain ecosystem”.
Latest entry includes Bitcoin god, Bitcoin Private and Bitcoin Pizza this January. Many new ones may also be experiencing in future with the Forkgen site. Thus, enabling anyone to clone without any exceptional programming skills.
Once developers do a spin-off of the fork from the original chain, holders of the unique tokens get the new tokens of the fork for free at a given ratio.Therefore, it is normal for the price of the newly forming to shoot immediately before the open award and then to drop afterward.
The latest attempts to fork Bitcoin zeros on some issues related to improving transaction speed. However, which has been a great concern for many users. Others aim at lowering transaction costs which have been another source of complaint on the Bitcoin network.
Some forks also zero on decentralizing the network further. There have been claims that the system is tending to centralization with mining reward. Also, consensus favoring those with state-of-the-art mining GPU machines. Therefore, some forks aim at eliminating this bias to make it possible to mine with CPUs.
Kimionis said forking might become a popular alternative to initial coin offering. Even forks from the main chain get forked too. For instance, Bitcoin Candy is a proposal fork from Bitcoin Cash, which was fork off Bitcoin last year.
Some also try to emulate other forks that have been successful in the recent past such as Bitcoin Cash.
“Bitcoin Cash was successful, quite a lot of momentum. Now other traders try to see if they can pull off the same thing”.
Source of the article: https://coinpedia.org/news/bitcoin-fork-welcome-50-forks-year
