Bitcoin Splits in Two Amid Feud (cnet.com)
Bitcoin is dividing in two. Disagreements about how to operate the cryptocurrency have led to a new strand called Bitcoin Cash, which is breaking off from the bitcoin system. From a report: Bitcoin Cash launches Tuesday in what is known as a "hard fork" from bitcoin, a virtual currency based on peer-to-peer transactions without any central authority or bank behind it. The new offshoot is a response to the increasing popularity of bitcoin, which is struggling to deal with massive numbers of transactions with its underpinning technology. The main bitcoin currency is adopting a system called Segwit2x that moves transactions out of the current blockchain, while bitcoin Cash will use bigger blocks within the blockchain. Bitcoin holders are set to receive the same amount of bitcoin cash as they have in bitcoin if the exchanges and wallets they use support the new coin, another report added. Exchanges including Kraken and ViaBTC have said they'll support both, while others like Coinbase and Poloniex have said they won't, citing uncertainty that bitcoin cash will have lasting market value.
BTC is clearly the inferior of the two coins, so why does it get to win? Still have HOURS-long confirmation times, tiny block size, etc.. makes it useless for F2F transactions, merchant payments, etc..
I fixed the headline...this is clearly a shell game of some sort. Someone is going to get very rich and a lot of little folks are about to get screwed.
I just love seeing crypto currency fail and hearing the wails and moans of nerds losing money.
I must be missing something. I assume everyone involved is working toward strengthening the currency as a whole and not trying to undermine it's success. With that goal in mind it would seem coming to terms over it's future would make a lot more sense than segmenting it's user base.
Just another opportunity for someone to game the system and screw people out of their Bitcoin... I expect a headline within the next couple of weeks/months about someone losing all of the hard earned Bitcoin because of it...
sorry bout ur internet drugbux friendos
cant handle being just that. How do you expect to have Bitcoin widely accepted as a real currency if it starts to fall apart as soon as it gets widely accepted?! Bitcoin seems to be its own worst enemy... NEXT!
This is asking for even more regulation than just over IPO where cryptocurrency scams steal millions, this behavior demands regulation of every aspect to prevent millions more from simply disappearing. There is a reason issuing currency is restricted to large government bodies, those that face some shred of accountability.
/s
Thought about investing in Bitcoin a few times. My instincts told me something was "off" a few times. Some people are going to be left holding the bag and a small few are going to walk away rich.
My opinion is that cryptocurrency lacks integrity and prone to market manipulation.
How does a thing like this even work? What I'm reading is that everyone with bitcoin will now have an equal amount of bitcoin cash, and from now on the value of each will be uncoupled. Does this mean in the short run after the split the value of bitcoin is halved (at least), until the market decides how this will play out? What if I don't have a wallet that supports both at the outset, am I locked out from getting my bitcoin cash issue?
I'm starting ANOTHER new ripUoffCurrency.
K Coin now available! Just send you CASH to PO BOX 7184
That's how this works, right? :)
but not much technical discussion... sigh. Is increasing block size much of a solution?
" Bitcoin holders are set to receive the same amount of bitcoin cash as they have in bitcoin IF the exchanges and wallets they use support the new coin" big if!
I predict this will fail.
And broke it in two.
You can't do anything with it. It's just bits on a disk, but too bad the fanbois don't grok that. They think they have something. They're just lying to themselves. The guy in 2010 that used 10,000 Bitcoins to buy two pizzas knows that for a fact now. 10,000 just for a couple of pizzas! You can as an individual mine for 250 years and still have 50% chance now of getting a coin, but you need 9,999 more of them just to get a couple of pizzas. What a joke.
I presume only one fork will really survive. After a period of double-spend shenanigans, I expect the larger block size fork will be the sole survivor. Since it's effectively evicting all of the Chinese miners, some 40% of the mining power of the network, the block difficulty for the new, larger block chain should plummet, making mining far more attractive to individuals again. In addition, the new chain should have radically cheaper transaction fees, which will tend to push transactions to use it. Where the people go, so goeth the cryptocurrency. I doubt even the Chinese population that uses Bitcoin will stick with the original fork; they hate transaction fees as much as anyone else, if not more.
Bitcoin might actually be useful for microtransactions again. Sorry, bitcoin Cash...
early on - I once requested a free bitcoin - it never arrived, later mtgox got hacked and the bitcion community never really recovered from that imho.
Then I had another go at bitcoin some years ago and somehow came to the conclusion that while i had store of gigabytes of useless crap for which i needed to buy a gpu for or a btc 'rig'/server to do stuff.
Having no btc one of our last microsoft windows pc succumbed to ransomware, i was glad i did not pay - it got us ms free- yes we had backups of data. Inconvenience is cheaper.
At that point i quit Even today i see http bots looking for walet.dat files
I still do not own a $600+ gpu.
This dungeons and dragons money (mtgox) is a bit useless. It wont buy beer
They've been in the news lately: http://www.reuters.com/investi...
What do people who have BTC in their wallet (and have not done anything with it in a year) do when it splits? Many will do nothing, will they lose thier BTC or BitcoinCash? will they only have BTC? will they later be able to use their BitcoinCash or will that be lost? Will folks have to chose by a certain date which they will 'convert' to?
First how does this split prevent double spending ? Each block chain initially has all the wealth records of everyone. So now if I pay bob 1 bitcoin by posting the transaction to BTcash my wallet over on bitcoinOriginal isn't debited. Why can't I now pay Anna the same coin but posting the transaction on btOriginal?
Second question is about your clever derivative idea. Someone has to hold they key to the Reserve backing the derivative. What happens if they decide to spend the reserve?
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Bit coin is not limited to that rate of transactions. It's rate limit is infinitely higher than Visa. What you are confusing is transactions and mining events. Mining events happen slowly as you indicate. But each event can process an unlimited number of pending transactions. Thus the latency of transactions is ten minutes but the bandwidth is unlimited-- it's like a station wagon full of microSd cards has higher bandwidth than the internet just high latency
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Bitcoin FORK != Bitcoin
WTF is the underlying value behind BTC (or Ethereum, etc.) other than its own artificially created scarcity? Gold, cars, jewelry and other "investments" have value whether it's aesthetic or whatever, so can usually be enjoyed in some fashion while you own it. And real American $$ have the advantage of being - you know - legal tender for all debts, public and private" so is immensely useful/valuable. BTC, from all I can see, is just fools gambling. What am I missing?
Just goes to prove you don't need a government or central bank to eff up a currency.
"fork you"
Just fork it :)
aaaaaaa
This is not a Bitcoin split, It is only another attempt to make another altcoin. A real fork might come in about 4 months, when the time to activate 2mb blocks come according to the New York Agreement. Strange as it may sound, the backers this little altcoin were also in favor of that agreement, so the reason behind them introducing another altcoin before that escapes me. There is no reason why this particular altcoin would be preferable to real Bitcoin or other alternatives such as Litecoin. If something, its technically worse and markets agree. As is typical of the introduction of brand new coins, you have probably seen the highest value it will ever have. Very rarely a new coin survives after it goes public, its usually just a race to the bottom and then disappear forgotten.
Bitcoin is a couple of weeks away from activating segwit, opening the doors for pretty much unlimited fast and cheaper transactions, putting the final nail in the coffin to the madness of enlarging the block size.
If you had bitcoins before the fork you will have them in both branches. If you acquire them in one branch you will not have them in the other. Now one branch will have the ability to do 8 times as many transactions as the other and lower transaction fees. We now have 3 types of coins. Ones from before the fork and ones on each fork. The ones after the fork will have different values/exchange rates. The ones still unspent from before the fork will likely have a value that is the sum of the two. Now if one fork gains more traction than the other that fork will become more valuable. My bet is on bitcoin cash because it is more useful for me. I don't speculate on bitcoin, I don't use it as a store of wealth and I don't use it to measure the value of anything. I use it strictly for transactions, to exchange value with others. The old system was limited to a rather pathetically slow rate.
Bitcoin was mostly safe from a quantum computer since you only revealed you public key at the time you created an input to a transaction. Before that, all people saw was the hash of your public key. Now however when you spend a pre-fork bitcoin on one side of the branch you reveal your public key, someone with a quantum computer could then figure out your private key and spend the bitcoin in the other side of the fork. I would therefore recommend that everyone cycle their current bitcoin in both forks sometime in the next 5 years, just to be paranoid.
I might be movin' to Montana soon
Just to raise me up a crop of
crypto coins
[...]
Movin' to montana soon
Gonna be a bitcoin tycoon
[...]
By myself I wouldn't
Have no boss,
But I'd be raisin' my lonely
crypto coins
Raisin' my lonely
crypto coins
So which one do we pay our ransom to?
Impetuous! Homeric!
The solution to this problem is to split transactions into blocksizes based on transaction amount. You could have several blockchains, each catering to a specific amount range.
Larger amounts would assumedly need fewer transactions, while smaller amounts need a great many and have a much lower required time to process, so should be done in much greater batches.