The blockchain is one big consensus platform where we can freely and privately send and receive digital cash. This all has been made possible due to the hard work of the miners.
What's a hardfork?
A hardfork is simply the result of when the miners together don’t agree on certain rules of running the blockchain. Since the blockchain is decentralized and not only 1 person is responsible for the entity, now all miners decide what is going to happen and they all have the right to vote whenever a change is necessary.
Example
let’s say bitcoin has a 100 miners and they are all working with the same set of rules that they only validate blocks that can add up to 1mb of transactions per block. However at some point there is someone who says “how about we start working with bigger blocks that can contain transactions up to 2mb?"
He can introduce this idea to the other miners and the miners will have to vote whether they support this idea or not. If more than 50% agrees on the increase of te blocksize, a hardfork happens. It means that the existing blockchain will split at a certain block and creates a new blockchain a.k.a a new ledger. So let’s say bitcoins hardfork will be at block 500, than from that block bitcoincash will start it’s own blockchain starting from block 1 again. However, bitcoincash will keep the history of the bitcoin ledger to remain the same information. The only difference now between bitcoin and bitcoin cash is that they continue with different rules.
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