If you’ve never bought Bitcoin, it’s easy to feel jealous of anyone who amassed a huge stash when they were worthless and then became unfeasibly wealthy.
But there’s hope for anyone who’s worried they have missed the boat in the form of several new cryptocurrencies created by ‘forking’.
That’s the name for a process in which a new coin is created by creating a branch on an existing blockchain – the name for the virtual ‘ledger’ which stories cryptocurrency transactions.
The most famous forked currency is Bitcoin Cash, which was created in August 2017
August 1 when a group of Bitcoin miners announced that they would be ‘forking’ to create a new currency which makes trading faster and easier.
Logging transactions on the Bitcoin blockchain is notoriously slow, with between three and 7 logged every second. Bitcoin Cash is designed to work much faster and allow many more transactions to be logged at a speedier pace.
Thomas Lee, an analyst with Fundstrat, said forked cryptocurrencies could prove to be a good investment.
‘Tokens with upcoming forks and airdrops have outperformed bitcoin by 4.8% since the peak of altcoins,’ he wrote in a briefing note, according to Fortune.
A new currency called Bitcoin Private will fork from two blockchains – Bitcoin and ZClassic – on February 28, combining both blockchains by ‘co-forking’.
In March, there are three forks to look out for.
On March 1, a fork from Ripple will form a currency called Onology. Callisto will be created in a fork from Ethereum Classic on March 5 and MoneroV from Monero on March 14.
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