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Bitcoin Is Forking. Again. (vice.com)
Merely weeks after it was announced that Bitcoin was splitting into two separate entities, the initial version of bitcoin and it's new "bitcoin cash," the network is adding a third version, according to a report. From the article: On Wednesday, a group of bitcoiners scheduled yet another split for the network in November, which would create a third version of bitcoin. So, what makes this version different from the others? Right now, the bitcoin network can sometimes take a long time to process transactions due to so many people using it. This is because the "blocks" of transaction data that get added to bitcoin's public ledger, the blockchain, are getting full. In the weeks preceding the fork, bitcoin coalesced around a solution called "segregated witness," which will change how data is stored in blocks to free up some space when it kicks in later in August. But the size of the blocks themselves will stay at one megabyte on the original bitcoin blockchain. Still, some bitcoiners maintained that the only way to speed bitcoin up for the foreseeable future was to increase the size of blocks themselves. So, a group of bitcoin companies and developers got together and launched a fork called bitcoin cash, which does not include segregated witness. It bumped the size of blocks up to a maximum of eight megabytes. That fork was widely anticipated to be a failure before it happened, but at the time of writing, bitcoin cash is trading above $300 USD per coin, which is comparable to cryptocurrencies like ethereum. Sounds like everyone got what they wanted, right? Oh, no. There's a third group of bitcoin developers, companies, and users who advocate for a "best of both worlds approach." This group includes Bitmain, the largest bitcoin infrastructure company in the world, and legendary bitcoin developer Jeff Garzik. They got together back in May and signed what is known as the "New York Agreement," which bound them to implement a two megabyte block size increase alongside segregated witness via a hard fork within six months of the time of signing. They call the fork Segwit2x. Now, that's exactly what's happening. According to an announcement posted to the Segwit2x GitHub repository, a bitcoin block between one and two megabytes will be created at block 494,784.
Its getting closer and closer to paper money.
> That fork was widely anticipated to be a failure before it happened, but at the time of writing, bitcoin cash is trading above $300 USD per coin, which is comparable to cryptocurrencies like ethereum.
Well it is quite a failure in terms that it was given to each Bitcoin owner, and yet most owners dropped it, resulting in price drop from default 100% (you had N bitcoins and N of BCH "bitcoin-cash" tokens)
through 50% (two times more BCH was sold then bought) - on futures market
through 20% - when real trading opened, not just futures,
then 10%
now trading at 6-8% of original Bitcoin price.
Also this does not account for all the people who did not yet bothered to sell the BCH "bitcoin-cash" tokens they are given (e.g. because it's in cold-wallet, burried somewhere, or on address not used in years) - or because it is simply lost forever (all addresses that had N amount of BTC on August 1, were "given" also N of BCH).
Another metric is hashing power (mining power), it is at around 10% of original Bitcoin's.
In the future, everyone will have their own cryptocurrency for 15 minutes.
When one pyramid scheme isn't enough to fuel speculation, triple down on it.
Cryptos are consuming more and more electricity when humanity should save it up... Bitcoin and etheruem miners are RUINING THE EARTH !!!
The "success" of Bitcoin Cash has shown the way, as it is currently worth > $300 without impacting the price of BTC. Free money, right? So it will be seen as a no-brainer to keep doing hard forks, as long as different parties in the BTC ecosystem see some advantage to it.
But at some point, all of these hard forks will make it abundantly clear to everyone that there is nothing special about any cryptocurrency. They're all made up out of the ether. They may provide some marginal utility for currency transfer across borders, but as investment vehicles (which is what is driving the current price spikes), putting your money in a cryptocurrency is like getting involved in a bidding war for a patch of tulips sitting in the middle of a infinite field of them.
BTC is "special", because there are only 21 million of them, right? Except maybe if there are 210 million, or 21 billion, or 21 trillion, because hey, here comes another hard fork of the blockchain by some group that wants to get rich quick. At some point the whole cryptocurrency mania collapses as everyone realizes just how limitless they really are. That is something that the people pushing BTC do not want to happen, but it is inevitable.
There are interesting times ahead for cryptocurrencies.
The eventual result will be the will be a separate forked bitcoin for every potential user and then their true value will be seen.
What I don't understand, is why bitcoin is being valued so stupidly highly. To me, this kind of instability is frightening. The risk of losing value is so high that only a fool would invest.
And yet in the real world, I'm the fool because if I had bought bitcoin earlier on, I'd be filthy rich now.
The usefulness of these forks may simply be that they allow an algorithm to determine at the moment of your transfer what coin has the greatest transaction speed at that moment for that transaction, so there will develop an abstract "Bitcoin of Bitcoins," environment. If you fold the other major coins in to such a "Coin of Coins" environment, money transfer goes to a truly mind-boggling level of abstraction. It would be like having one blank credit card that represents the best credit card deal at the moment for that particular purchase.
E Proelio Veritas.