A fork is when the main chain of a cryptocurrency is splitted in two parts. The main one and the new one. When a fork happens, if you have 1 coin in the main chain, you”l have another one in the second splitted chain. If you own 1 BTC since august, you’ll have 200-300$ in others coins!
You have to pay attention on your private keys, so it’s really important to move your BTC to another address before claiming from the original private keys!
Here you can find a complete and updated list of Bitcoin forks.
Bitcoin Forks
A complete list of all Bitcoin forks
In order to claim all these forks, you have to use the private keys of the Bitcoin wallet which contain your BTC at the time that the coin is forked. Before using the private keys, you have to move your BTC to another wallet with a different couple of private keys!
How to safely claim Bitcoin forks
Let’s take for example Bitcoin Cash (BCH). It forked on August 1, 2017 at a Bitcoin block height of 478,558. The number of BTC you had in your Bitcoin wallet at that time, you now have the same amount of BCH. To claim BCH, it’s mandatory to export the private keys from your Bitcoin wallet into a BCH wallet.
The first rule is: never give your private keys to anyone!
Before claim BCH, be sure to move all your bitcoins to a new wallet. After that, you can import your original private keys into the BCH wallet, let it synchronize with the net and finally tou’ll have the amount of BCH claimed!