Bitcoin Forks Explained: How BCH, BTG, and BSV Came to Be

A Bitcoin fork occurs when developers, miners, and other network participants propose changes to the consensus rules that govern how transactions are validated and blocks are produced on a blockchain. This can result in either a routine protocol upgrade or the creation of an entirely separate blockchain.

The history of Bitcoin forks reflects some of the biggest disagreements over scalability, mining, and the future direction of the protocol. Take Bitcoin Cash (BCH), which emerged from Bitcoin in 2017 after a prolonged dispute over how to scale the network.

Bitcoin Gold (BTG) changed Bitcoin's mining algorithm to reduce dependence on specialized ASIC hardware, making mining more accessible to users with graphics processing units. But its adoption and network activity remained far below that of Bitcoin.