Can someone give me some context on what is causing this?
There are currently two main ideas on how to scale Bitcoin. One camp is the called Bitcoin Unlimited and it's a proposal that allows the miners to adjust the block size as needed.
The other idea is called Segregated Witness or Segwit. This is a change in the way bitcoin transactions are counted towards the 1MB per block limit. It will allow slightly more transactions per block but also adds functionality that could allow other types of transactions. Those will be useful in some situations, e.g. paying the same entitiy many times over the course of the relationship.
Some people in the Segwit camp are tired of waiting so they are attempting to force the issue without the support of most miners. The date they picked is Aug 1.
Since very few miners support this move, it's not likely to succeed in my opinion, but nobody knows for sure.
I don't understand why the bitcoin.org page sounds so alarmist. If the miners are not in on it why would some special Bitcoin blockchain (with alternative rules) matter, since miners could easily DoS this chain, if they wanted to, in case they don't support it?
Anyone can create their own chain with non-agreed-upon-rules (e.g. testnet3 or regtest), but that's just not Bitcoin precisely because it's practically ignored by miners (like a UASF).
Are bitcoin.org, themselves, supporters of this UASF?
If the community is behind it, then a POW change would render the 10s/hundreds of millions of dollars in mining equipment worthless.
So the real question is whether or not the UASF side has the support of the community or economic majority.
You change the proof of work algorithm so that the existing miners can't use their fancy Bitcoin miners, and it becomes profitable to mine with GPUs instead.
Peercoin is one of the first working proof of stake implementations that has been running for close to 5 years now.
Yes.
The bitcoin.org page says:
> Do not trust any payments you receive after Tue Aug 01 2017 02:00:00 GMT+0200 (CEST) until the situation is resolved. No matter how many confirmations the new payment says it has, it can disappear from your wallet at any point up until the situation is resolved.
Which I don't understand, unless miners are actively trying to make this happen (by mining on two different chains with roughly the same hashing power). According to the paper[1], as long as at least 20% of the hashing power is honest, 11 confirmations should be final (in 99.9% of cases)
[1] https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf (page 8)
There is nothing that prevents 2 forks from existing for an indefinite amount of time, just look at ethereum and ethereum classic.
The question of the year is whether one side will suddenly crash down to a price of 0.
If the UASF has majority economic support (unlikely) and also the miners do not support it, initially the UASF side will be behind, and there will be multiple chains. There will be the UASF chain and the normal chain.
But since the UASF has more support, it'll have more block reward, and eventually it'll have more hashrate behind it. It'll eventually catch up to the other chain, pass the other chain, and then...
The other chain completely implodes, and stops existing. Yes, that's actually what happens, and why if you are a miner, you should be afraid of the UASF. You lose basically everything if the UASF ends up with more hashrate, and the UASF is eventually guaranteed to have more hashrate if it has a higher coin price.
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Basically, your doomsday scenario dramatically understates the worst-case scenario.
Are you sure? If I'm not wrong, this isn't that much different from Ethereum/Ethereum Classic situation.
Ethereum Classic's price is no where near Ethereum's but it is still maintaining a good position - 5th by Market Cap and 3rd by 24hr volume.
You are saying the ALL of the mining power will eventually move over, but what if it doesn't the miners (85% of whom support Segwit2x) stay on the non-UASF fork?
UASF Bitcoin will be very weak, so I can't expect what would happen, but I'm just saying its not so simple.
ETC's price is being pumped up (some more context can be found on /r/ethereum), in some cases by taking advantage of newcomers looking to get into the ETH craze, helped by the fact that the Ethereum Foundation doesn't seem interested in maintaining ownership how the word "Ethereum" is used. There's no real technological innovation or developer interest in ETC.
>There's no real technological innovation or developer interest in ETC.
I mean, ETC guys can just push all of the new developments in ETH to their code. The codebase is the same. There probably won't be any original developments in ETC, but they don't really need much to stay on par with ETH.
Here's an intro (google around for more): https://www.reddit.com/r/ethtrader/comments/6d62td/the_story...
https://medium.com/@charlescmackay/barry-silbert-and-the-cos...
Not saying ETH is perfect, far from it, but ETC is a pumped up scam for sure. They're using "Ethereum" in the name to fool newbies, likely propping up the price at current levels. I seriously doubt anyone know is knowledgable/not in on the scam really invests in a coin that is identical to ETH but none of the leadership, community or dev interest.
Now that that's out the way, let me say the cognitive dissonance in that post is palpable. Words are conveniently placed so spin the situation into something else.
r/Bitcoin is shown to be the culprit here, just because they are the ones with the most subs and poking fun at ETH. The reality was every other altcoin community was doing the exact same thing. I was watching everything closely when as it unfolded. I can link you posts from other subreddits if you want.
>The Ethereum community stuck together, worked together, and fought back. Successfully
This is false. Quite a few of the ETH community fought for not forking. No one wants to lose money, so who wouldn't want to fork. Many vocal people invested quite a bit of their funds so it is completely understandable.
The irony here is, even the 'rogue hackers' were probably part of the ETH community. Who else would know the codebase so well? The phrase 'stuck together' is false.
>Barry Silberts co-owned exchange "Poloniex" raced to be the first exchange to start trading the coin of this old chain (ETC)
Looks like something a smart person would do. I would also capitalize on trades that people will make with ETC. You've immediately got twice the volume therefore double the fees that can be collected. This is clearly a good business decision. Doing that before other exchanges means more fees collected!
>ETC is an Attack against Ethereum
That's a bold claim. I don't see any 'attack'. Any person with half a brain can see which one is the original ETH. It is a fork, so calling it an attack is dramatic.
>It's a technological attack, and a monetary scam
Big words. I don't see any technology being used to attack ETH. Just people mining the coin they support.
>If you have bought, or holding, or still planning to buy ETC, be ready to get hit by some nasty surprises down the road ( on those days - and I can already foresee a few - I will be linking everyone back to this thread right here, as a reminder).
Now who sounds like they are spreading FUD?
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While Poloniex was made out to be the perpetrator, it has only 5% of the 24hr transaction volume. So pointing fingers at the Poloniex person was baseless and foolish.
I believe in a bright future for ETH and will probably get into it, but falsifying events is a great way to show others that the community can't self-police and is an echo chamber.
If we end up with Bitcoin and BitcoinSW, and BSW is the minority (like Etherum Classic), we'd have a situation like today. Except, if BSW were to ever catch up to Bitcoin in total work, when it passed Bitcoin (51% hashrate is enough to cause this), it would obliterate the original chain, and become the only chain.
This property is why we gave it a new name (UASF).
Nodes can continue to follow it if they feel like it, and change their code.
There is nothing that stops someone from saying "yes, this chain has less proof of work, but I don't care".
You could argue that this would cause the old chain the be less valuable, but the old chain doesn't literally get deleted from people's hard drives in all scenarios.
The Wipeout scenario is overhyped, because of how nodes can choose to follow the old chain if they feel like it.
IE, old nodes would effectively be soft forking by adding a check point onto the old chain.
Both sides have proposed ways forward, only to be rejected by the community. A large number of companies and miners in the space came together recently in New York to agree on a compromise. The New York Agreement (NYA) was to combine two of the proposals- Segregated Witness, a soft-fork that provides some new features and a modest capacity increase, and a 2-MB hardfork.
In response, extremists on the "small-blocker" side have declared that they'll likely force a chain-split on August 1st via a so-called "use-activated soft-fork".
Now it's time to see what the market thinks :)