Bitcoin Offshoots: Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin Gold and Bitcoin Private
But some of these blockchains—including Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin Gold, and Bitcoin Diamond—are direct forks of Bitcoin and share most of their DNA with the leading cryptocurrency. But instead of being forked directly from bitcoin, as was the case with popular cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin Gold, Bitcoin Private was created from a copy of a digital currency known as Zclassic which is itself a fork of ZCash, and ZCash itself was a fork of the original bitcoin.
If someone wants to change the rules, and the people running Bitcoin nodes maintaining the bitcoin network can agree that the new rules will make bitcoin better, then they can be implemented with no issue through either a soft fork, which happens when the proposed changes are backwards compatible or a hard fork when the proposed changes are not backwards compatible and a new chain and cryptocurrency must be created. If you are holding Bitcoin at the time of the fork, then you will also receive the cryptocurrency associated with the new chain.
