The dawn of cryptocurrency and blockchain has brought with it some interesting concepts–along with new jargon to describe them–such as “soft forks” and “hard forks.” A hard fork refers to a change in the protocol or an upgrade to the protocol software. This often results in the creation of new cryptocurrency out of the old one–the old one continues to exist alongside the new one. A soft fork happens when previous transactions are invalidated through a change in the software protocol. Hard forks are the more common of the two types of forks.
Bitcoin forks
Bitcoin, which is currently the most popular cryptocurrency in the world, has been split multiple times in the past, yielding other cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin Smart, and Bitcoin Gold. The Bitcoin blockchain has so far been forked a total of 29 times, giving birth to 29 other cryptocurrencies. However, the three major hard forks are the ones that led to the creation of Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin Gold and Bitcoin Private.
The first Bitcoin hard fork took place on August 1, 2017, leading to the creation of Bitcoin Cash, which was distributed to all Bitcoin holders at a 1:1 ratio. This means that every Bitcoin holder got 1 Bitcoin Cash in addition to every 1 Bitcoin he or she owned. The second major hard fork took place on October 24, 2017, resulting in the creation of Bitcoin Gold. Bitcoin holders also got Bitcoin Gold at a 1:1 ratio. The third Bitcoin hard fork took place on February 28 this year, and the resulting cryptocurrency was Bitcoin Private, which was also awarded to Bitcoin holders at the same ratio.
Bitcoin Rhodium
A lesser-known coin, known as Bitcoin Rhodium (BTR), is a Bitcoin descendant, but not from a hard fork. According to its website, it is one of the rarest cryptocurrencies, with only 2.1 million BTR available in the market. It was created by Bitcoin’s blockchain development team and introduced towards the end of last year through an “airdrop,” a process in which tokens are distributed to existing cryptocurrency holders, which started in December and was scheduled to end on March 31.
Bitcoin Rhodium is being developed as a new cryptocurrency–in spite of its name–using C# as the programming language.
The agenda of the team working on BTR was to work on a coin that would be extremely rare while still containing all the best features of Bitcoin. According to the coin’s introduction paper, only 2.1 million BTR will ever be available; half of them were introduced into the market for trading while the other half will be acquired through crypto mining over the next 100 years.
Making Bitcoin Rhodium a scarce cryptocurrency was part of the development team’s idea of not only offering it as a payment method but also as a valuable coin. Even the name was adopted from one of the rarest metals on earth. This rare nature of Bitcoin Rhodium also makes it designed to be an ideal store of wealth. The development team created a community that will provide long-term support through a VoIP app called Discord.
Comparison between Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin Rhodium
While Bitcoin Rhodium was centred on scarcity, Bitcoin Cash was created as a solution for Bitcoin scalability problems. It is also used to make payments and can also be mined just like Bitcoin Rhodium.
