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Differentiate between a ‘Soft Fork’ and a ‘Hard Fork’ in Cryptocurrency.

A soft fork is a backward-compatible change to the blockchain's protocol rules. Older nodes that do not upgrade will still see the new blocks as valid, though they cannot enforce the new rules.

A hard fork is a permanent, non-backward-compatible divergence from the previous version of the blockchain. Nodes that do not upgrade will see the new blocks as invalid, resulting in two separate, competing chains.

Hard forks often lead to the creation of a new cryptocurrency.

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