![intro.png](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmatMEBwXYFe5pEwF4hoJL87Mac7dRf5fZxCVTrV8A6t3i/intro.png)

Introduction

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Hi steemians, The Steemit Crypto Academy community welcomes all users to the platform and invites them to participate actively in this fourth and final week of Season 4 Steemit Engagement Challenges which will take place starting tomorrow, Monday, September 19th at 00:00 UTC. We renew our thanks to all members who remained loyal to our contests, which aim to further explain and simplify concepts related to the field of Blockchain and cryptocurrencies. We also invite you to participate in this week's challenge and contribute to enriching the platform with your work, as well as interacting with your colleagues by leaving relevant comments and votes. This week we will focus on the blockchain forks process, and we want to read your understanding. ---

Contest theme: Blockchain Forks

This week, the focus of the contest we will be discussing is about understanding the Blockchain Forks process. The forks are related to the fact that different parties need to use common rules to preserve the history of the database. When the parties do not agree, alternate strings may appear. While most forks are short-lived, some are permanent. The short-lived difficulties are due to the difficulty of reaching consensus in a distributed system. Whereas permanent forks (meaning protocol changes) have been used to add new features to the blockchain, to reverse the effects of hacking, or catastrophic bugs on the blockchain as was the case with the August 6, 2010 Bitcoin fork or the fork between Ethereum and Ethereum Classic. ---

What is expected in the Contest?

- Using your own terms to define what is a fork in general? - Using any blockchain example, explain what a Hard Fork is. - Using any blockchain example, explain what a Soft Fork is. - What are the differences between Hard Forks and Soft Forks? - Explain the Steem and Hive Hard fork by showing the similarities/differences in their Genesis blocks. ---

Contest Guidelines

• Post your articles in the Steemit Crypto Academy community. The participation time is between **Monday, September 19th, 2022, 00:00 UTC to Sunday, September 25th, 2022, 23:59 UTC.** • The article should be at minimum **500** words. You can write more. Your article must be free of any form of plagiarism. • Your article title should be **Steemit Crypto Academy Contest / S4W4 - Blockchain Forks . Add the tag #cryptoacademy-s4w4 and other relevant tags. • Participants must be appropriately following #club5050 or #club75 or #club100. • The community moderators would be leaving quality assessments on your articles and probable upvotes. • In addition, your article must get at least **10 upvotes** and **5 valid comments** to count valid in the contest, so ensure you interact with other users' entries. Do not be involved in vote-buying. --- **Rewards** • SC01 would be checking on the entire 7 participating communities and upvoting outstanding content. **Upvote is not guaranteed for all articles**. Kindly take note. • At the end of the week, we would nominate **top 3** users that had performed well in the contest and they would be eligible for votes from **SC01/SC02**. --- **Important Notice:** The nomination of the **top 3** users in our community is not based on good grades alone, it includes their general engagements (quality and quantity of their interactions with other users' articles) to measure the overall performance. Also note that generally, you can only make **one post per day** in the Steemit Engagement Challenge. ---

Conclusion

Forks take place when excessive divergences prevent the members of a community linked to a cryptocurrency from reaching a compromise on the evolution of the latter or when a serious event has occurred. Some forks are successful and manage to become more popular than the original cryptocurrency, but in the majority of cases, it is the digital asset that existed first that keeps most of the community on its side because investors have generally more affinities with the basic project. We are looking forward to your participation and we wish you many success in the contest.