Can you imagine the uproar if Visa said the same thing? It would be totally unthinkable.
Bitcoin can get away with this type of "disruption" because it's not really being used for anything other than a speculative vehicle.
No, that's exactly what Visa says, they call it chargeback. That's why it is hard to buy bitcoins with bank cards.
Who do I call if bitscoins just evaporate from my wallet thanks to this fork?
Bitcoins transacted before July 31 WILL stay in your wallet. They are not going to evaporate any time soon.
But now that you bring up governance, bitcoin is essentially being steered by a handful of mining pools, not by loosely knit community of private individuals :)
If you as a business accept(ed) Visa payments in Zimbabwe's currency in 2008, or Venezuelan bolivars over the last few years, you absolutely can have its value disappear from you.
This is not a fair representation of what the article says. It doesn't only say that coins you've received may lose value, it says that there's no guarantee the network will recognize the contents of your wallet in the future.
A more accurate analogy would be me handing you a crisp $100 bill which you place in your wallet, and tomorrow when you go to retrieve it, it has vanished into thin air.
Even a turd of a currency like ZWD won't materially vanish. You just have to spend it as quickly as possibly after you receive it, while it still holds value.
In that unlikely but possible scenario: Your wallet would have received coins on Chain A, but the majority of the network now favors Chain B and as a result is ignoring Chain A.
You still have the private key to coins and can spend them on Chain A. It's just problematic because they're on a chain fewer people value. Fewer, but not zero. They will still have some value, just less, and will be able to be sold out of band for coins on Chain B if desired.
This has already happened with Ethereum [1]. Each chain has its own exchange rate.
> Even a turd of a currency like ZWD won't materially vanish. You just have to spend it as quickly as possibly after you receive it, while it still holds value.
The ZWD's rate of inflation was at one point at 79,600,000,000% [2]. We are getting pretty abstract if we're going to debate how close that is to materially vanishing.
[1] http://www.coindesk.com/ethereum-classic-explained-blockchai... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zimbabwean_dollar#Withdrawal_o...
Also, you can use ZWD notes as kindling. :)
We are doing a hardware presale using Bitcoin, and we're going to have to stop accepting Bitcoin at that time (it's a cryptocurrency miner, 90% of our sales are in Bitcoin), and that's going to hurt us.
This whole situation is frustrating.