What is a Fork, why are we doing these forks, and what happens to the coins I hold during a fork are the common questions regarding forks. Let's dig into each of those a little bit.
A "Fork" is just a fancy way of saying someone has made a 2nd copy of the code and decided to take it in a different direction. For example, imagine you have a team of programmers working on some code to make a crypto coin. Monday morning arrives and the programmers get in an argument about what features their coin should have. Some want it to be able to be mined by the general public, others want it all to be issued at once and have no mining support. Some want it as fast as possible even if that compromises anonymity, others want just the opposite, they want it to be as anonymous as possible even if that makes it run slower.
So, what they do is make a second copy of the existing code and one team takes the coin in one direction and the other team goes in another direction. Where before you had one set of code that made one type of coin, now that single set of code has been split, or "forked" into two sets of code, each of which would produce a coin with distinctly different features.
There can be a lot of reasons for a fork to occur, but typically it occurs either when the developers can't agree on a major feature and they split it into to different products. Or, it may occur when they are adding a big new feature or features and they want to leave the old coin behind and split off the code base to build the big new features into the coin.
If they leave the old coin behind and nobody cares, it eventually just disappears wherever unused programs go when they die. But, if there are fans of that old version, they can keep it running and you end up with two fully functioning versions of the same coin, albeit with different features.
So right now BitCoin (BTC) is going through two different forks, one to implement the SegWit2x features and the other to implement the Bitcoin Gold features. Segwit2x is a planned fork, one that we knew was going to happen as part of the plan to improve BTC. The BTC fork over the summer was the first step of Segwit and this fork is the second step. Bitcoin Gold on the other hand is different. BitCoin Gold is basically a team of developers that think if they were to make a copy of the code at this point and start a new coin they are calling BitCoin Gold, they could make this new coin's features be so desirable that people would prefer to hold BitCoin Gold coins rather than regular BitCoin coins.
The Bitcoin Gold fork does not have a lot of backing by the main exchanges (Poloniex, Bittrex, etc), so those exchanges are holding off offering it for trading until they see that it has stabilized and that it really becomes something. As I mentioned, they already made a copy of the code and coded their changes and deployed their coin yesterday. The fork that became BitCoin Gold uses BTG as it's ticker. The "main" fork that did not become BitCoin Gold remains with the BTC ticker.
On the other hand, the Segwit2x fork is strongly backed by almost all exchanges. It has been planned since even before the recent BTC fork this summer. When it occurs on the 16th, we will again end up with 2 BTC blockchains. If you own any BTC at the time, you will end up with that same amount of BTC in both chains after the fork.
Most exchanges are going to stick with the BTC name for the fork that DID NOT implement the Segwit2x change and use a new ticker, such as B2X for the fork that did implement Segwit2x.
One thing to remember, for both the BitCoin Gold and the Segwit forks, if you owned 10 BTC before the fork, you will own 10 BTC IN BOTH VERSIONS of the BitCoin coin after the fork. But, to do so you often need to store your BTC in a wallet where you control the keys - not in an exchange wallet.
Some exchanges have announced they will support one or both of the forks and in those exchanges they will handle issuing the new coins for you. But, if you want to make sure you get your coins, the best way to do so is to store the coins somewhere you manage the private keys.
Why all this forking? Well, the BitCoin Gold fork is an attempt by the developers to take away some of the power from the miners and the companies that make the mining equipment. They'd like to implement a new way of mining the coin that does not require the expensive mining equipment and therefore improve the democratization of BTC and make mining more accessible to everyone.
That sounds like a good thing, but the miners hold a lot of power right now and they are not in favor of this new coin. Additionally the development team kept a lot of the coin code secret, which made the miners AND the exchanges leery of supporting it. Only time will tell if it gains a backing.
The Segwit2x fork is much harder to explain, but it basically comes down to the concept of increasing the size of the blocks that BTC can handle to 2Mb. If/When BTC can handle bigger 2MB blocks, that means more transactions can fit inside each block which means faster transaction time, less waiting time for confirmations, and more money for the miners getting paid for each transaction they process.
So at the end of it all, which is the "real" BTC? We'll that's hard to say. Is is B2X because that fork was the result of the planned 2 phase of implementing Segwit? Or is it BTC, mostly because it holds the BTC name, but also because it hasn't been modified as much from it's original code. The thinking being the more original it is the more it deserves the BTC name.
I think only time will tell. Personally I'm a little surprised they changed the coin name for the Segwit2x branch. My thinking is that was part of the Segwit plan and therefore the coin that stuck to the plan should be the one that retains the BTC name. Segwit was done for a reason and it was only done after a rigorous multi-year debate about how the changes should be implemented. A ton of time and effort have been put into Segwit to get where we are and it seems strange to me that the way things look today, the coin that is really the BTC of the future may not even be called BTC anymore but B2X, or even something else down the road.
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