Assuming you have a particular currency in your wallet, you put it away for some time and then realise that it has split into two. Sounds unfamiliar❓
Not in the cryptocurrency world.
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If you’ve been a part of the crypto community for some time, you have probably heard the term ‘hard fork’ frequently. A lot of people may be wondering, what exactly it means. Perhaps you’ve heard of the most popular Bitcoin hard forks and have a brief idea of what they entail. Hard forks are newer versions of Bitcoin that are completely split from the original blockchain, resulting in the creation of new cryptocurrencies. There are no interactions between the original Bitcoin blockchain and the newer version after a hard fork. They function separately from each other and the change is permanent.
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BTC Ultimatum (BTCU) is a software update (not backwards compatible) to Bitcoin's blockchain protocol that changes the way the network operates, causing a divergence in the network. It is one of the several projects to fork away from the Bitcoin blockchain to create a new coin since the invention of Bitcoin, in 2009 by Satoshi Nakamoto.
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"It (BTC Ultimatum) is an evolutionary change to Bitcoin's energy consumption associated with mining, scalability and transaction anonymity which makes it more efficient." - according to the team.
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In recent years, the bitcoin network has been struggling to handle a surge in the number of transactions (scalability), mining centralization and transaction anonymity. This has resulted in the entire cryptocurrency community coming up with various options (forks) to solve these backlogs.
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BTCU increases the size of Bitcoin blocks in an effort to solve the cryptocurrency's inability to handle large amounts of transactions. It also addresses the cryptocurrency's mining centralization, making it more egalitarian by excluding expensive and powerful ASICs that has taken over Bitcoin. Again, it offers users anonymity by adjoining the ability to conduct transactions privately within the network. Through this option, users who value privacy can switch between public and private ledgers while making transactions.