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Comment by corobo | Hacker News Reader

Is there a resource out there that explains all of this simply? Is this something like a computer network split brain situation?

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the ownership of cryptocurrency is based on a cryptographically signed ledger. Today, everybody agrees who owns which bitcoin because everyone agrees on the rules of transfer.

When you change the rules of transfer in a subset of nodes/users, then all of a sudden there is disagreement about who owns what: there are two ledgers, and you look at the one whose opinion about "ownership" you agree with.

So the "fork" is a fork in ownership or truth: a difference of opinion about who owns what. Nothing more, nothing less.

But it's a complicated economic effect to predict, because it's likely that the losing side (the opinion with the smaller number of nodes supporting it) will wither and die - one major value proposition of bitcoin is that it's universal. But what happens to the people who used that losing fork in the interim? Well, basically none of their transactions were "real" (they didn't take place on the ledger that eventually won), and if you sold something to someone on that ledger, then they have the goods/services, and you have nothing.

So, as long as I hold on to the bitcoins I bought before all this madness started I should be safe? Like when in a few years some fork is the declared winner, I can still just sell my bitcoins on that winner network? (assuming bitcoins will be worth anything after those shenanigans).

Depends how you are holding bitcoins. On another thread, it appeared that Coinbase might be doing something sketchy in the case of certain kinds of forks. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14806636

I'm holding them in a wallet.dat file of the original bitcoin (full node) client that I haven't started in maybe a year or more. More or less a completely offline stash.

So you should be safe. Wait for the fork to happen and end, update the client to the "winner" side of the fork, and you'll be able to do transactions normally. What might happen is the coins might lose some market value in the short term due to the hysteria surrounding the fork.

thanks for the clarification. much appreciated!

> update the client to the "winner" side of the fork

But will the bitcoin client (from bitcoin.org) update to the winning rules or will I need to download it from somewhere else depending on who the winner is?

try this infographic: https://i.imgur.com/RjTkcdQ.png

That's a little misleading because it makes it look like each decision point is a chain split.

This one is better: https://media.coindesk.com/uploads/2017/07/Screen-Shot-2017-...

Different audiences. Most friends & acquaintances asking me for explanations about august 1

⒈ get repeatedly caught up on basic blockchain concepts (i.e. go in circles w/ terminology)

⒉ know absolutely nothing about the politics of the decision-making up to now

⒊ yet have already been exposed to somebody's propaganda and half-internalized the wrongthink

So i'm not sure that a flowchart of just the proposals w/o entities serves much purpose. Its audience is essentially limited to devs who just need to be caught up on current events.

Coin Dance already has this information available, but across two dashboard-style pages⁽¹⁾⁽²⁾ — not quite arranged efficiently enough for an interactive infographic.

Starting from "know your hardforks" and adding the missing bits from the flowchart as tooltip or on-hover information could work.

____________________

¹ https://coin.dance/blocks

² https://coin.dance/poli

O'Reilly just published an updated edition of their bestseller on Bitcoin technology, "Mastering Bitcoin," earlier this month.[1]

For a more general/conceptual understanding of blockchain technology and its applications, including non-cryptocurrency applications, "Blockchain Revolution" is a good read.[2]

[1] Mastering Bitcoin http://amzn.to/2uewdK9

[2] Blockchain Revolution http://amzn.to/2vniXSf

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