Please assume that I have 100 BTC at a particular address or small set of addresses, and I don't like the Chinese mining consortia.
How do I actually move my value to a new chain that 1) excludes those mining consortia, 2) preserves my stored value, and 3) preserves my ability to transact with any other valid BTC address? How can I get this done by next week?
As I stated elsewhere, this is impractical for Bitcoin because the value of the currency would tank. For applications like the one in this article that use general purpose blockchains, forking is very practical.
Even when the point of the chain is not to store value, but just data, it seems that we're already losing the ability to track all the old data. Sure I extract a set of the stuff I want and carry on with the new fork, but no one else comes along, their data is lost, so they don't come along. If all I care about is a close network of friends, or perhaps an internal company data store, then fine, but how does one cleanly tear off a chunk of a network that looks like the graph of FB or Twitter? Am I missing something here?
> Sure I extract a set of the stuff I want and carry on with the new fork, but no one else comes along, their data is lost, so they don't come along.
That's not how it works. When you fork, you typically bring the entire history with you. It's the new data after the fork that causes problems. If people don't switch or publish to both, you're stuck.
I love it when people say this shit. Ok, I'll just go fork Bitcoin. Unless I'm not a programmer. And I sure hope that somebody else follows me into my fork. Only a group of major (powerful) market players will have the ability to threaten to fork. And even then, they probably won't, for the exact reason you stated: a fracture in the currency would kill people's confidence in the currency and tank its value.
This is a major worrying part about Bitcoin. Would it be really that difficult for a nation-state level player to buy enough capacity on the network to take it over?