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Comment by dchuk | Hacker News Reader

As with most things Bitcoin: can someone please help explain this to me like I'm 5? I've read numerous articles, even a whole book, on Bitcoin, and I still struggle to wrangle all of the vocabulary and terms necessary to read through an article like this.

Is this a new Bitcoin about to form? Same thing? Are existing bitcoins in "danger"? I struggle to even think of valid questions for some of these topics, you'd think by now there'd have been an effort to make this stuff more easily digestible to common folk (and I'm a technical guy! this just whooshes right past me).

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Bitcoin has reached a limit on how many transactions per second can be confirmed. There's lots of ideas for how to resolve this, but no consensus.

The author is suggestion that one way this might soon be resolved is if 51% of the mining power all choose one specific option, a change in the protocol, and just start mining coins like that's the option everyone has agreed with. So long as you control most of the mining power, you can do that.

Now, this doesn't mean 51% of people- just 51% of the current processing power confirming Bitcoin transactions. And just for as long as it takes for everyone else to follow your lead. Once a couple big players give in, the rest will follow quicky.

Think of a git repo with all of the miners maintaining the master branch. If suddenly a majority of miners wants to create a new branch and they are over 51% of the miners, the new branch becomes the master branch.

Both branches still work. All coins before the fork apply to both branches, however, after the fork,both branches are different, any new coins purchased apply to only one branch.

It's essentially two coins at that point. Then essentially it's up to the payment processers like coinbase to decide which one to support.

So is there a danger that I may have Bitcoins from the wrong branch after the fork? How can I tell?

You'd still have the coins on both branches. However, what is likely to happen is that the value of the coins on one branch will fall to zero once a consensus is reached about which branch to use.

That doesn't explain what the divide is about(How to scale Bitcoin now that it has become so much more popular) and doesn't touch on the fact that as Bitcoin is still achieving internality, and most users don't hold their own Bitcoin the exchanges/wallets and the interface fiat-liquidity they provide matter A LOT and these parties largely support seg-wit which arguably gives them more power.

Segwit is still compatible with increasing the block size a la Bitcoin Unlimited. They are not being forced to give up segwit here. It's really two separate conversations. Supporting segwit doesn't mean automatically opposing BU.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14047294

Existing bitcoins are not in danger.

This is the primary confidence the market has amongst any of these perpetual emergencies, acquire all the bitcoin you want and ignore it.

When you want to transact on the bitcoin network, moving bitcoin from one address to another, thats when you want to be aware of this stuff.

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