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Comment by pavel_lishin | Hacker News Reader

> One thing we know for a fact is, if you owned bitcoins prior to the fork, you will get the same amount of SegWit and Cash varieties.

So am I dumb for not having bought some Bitcoins prior to the split, and getting free "money"?

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If the number of BTC suddenly doubled, you'd expect the value of each one to halve given rational expectations and perfect knowledge of BTC holders.

Of course a) the two BTC variants won't have equal worth and b) participants in the BTC economy have neither perfect knowledge nor total rationality (the level of rationality in the BTC ecosystem has been much debated over recent years as we all know) so the actual outcome may differ from the 'perfect' one, but the likelihood is that values will converge over time to the outcome that the value of BTC1+BTC2 post split is equal to the value of BTC pre-split, plus or minus any gains/losses along the way (which may include a reputational loss or gain based on how well the split goes).

Yes & no, consider this like a stock split. But instead of an even split, where your 1 share of GOOG becomes 2, both with the same price, you get 1 (or fraction of) BTC and BCC, where BTC = ~$2700 and BCC = ~$230.

The overall value may go up, but you may also see the cost of BTC drop by the value of BCC (like when a dividend is paid on a stock).

BCC could also lose adoption, and lose value significantly.

Not necessarily. The real total value may be constant, and will simply be split between the branches. That, of course, would not happen instantly, so there's probably a way to time it perfectly. As in, buy right before the split, and sell right after. But don't forget there are fees involved, and also the spread between buy and sell.

If one or either of them drops below the value of BTC pre-split, then no. No one knows what will happen, and assuming they'd not drop by the difference of pre-split is definitely not guaranteed, especially if you consider the pre-split price highly inflated.

Note I follow CC a little bit more than casually, no expert and I'm not sure what the GP means exactly by this statement.

Depends on how many people did that and what their intentions are.

Also to sell 8mb bitcoins, a >1MB mined block will have to be accepted by the network which may not happen for hours or days. There is a schedule for difficulty changes but there's no telling how long it will be before they are actually tradable.

[I was definitely wrong here]

UAHF specs that the fork happens after the 1st >=1MB block is mined.

https://github.com/Bitcoin-UAHF/spec/blob/master/uahf-techni...

But it looks like the "fork" is already happening, because Bitcoin Cash network rejected block 478559, and now has to mine one of its own.

    2017-08-01 13:23:46 ERROR: ContextualCheckBlock: BUIP055 fork block (00000000000000000019f112ec0a9982926f1258cdcc558dd7c3b7e5dc7fa148, height 478559) must exceed 1000000, but this block is 272502 bytes
    2017-08-01 13:23:46 ERROR: ProcessNewBlock: AcceptBlock FAILED
    2017-08-01 13:23:46 Invalid block due to bad-blk-too-small
    2017-08-01 13:23:53 ERROR: AcceptBlockHeader: block 00000000000000000019f112ec0a9982926f1258cdcc558dd7c3b7e5dc7fa148 height 478559 is marked invalid

// If UAHF is enabled for the curent block, but not for the previous block, we must check that the block is larger than 1MB. https://github.com/Bitcoin-ABC/bitcoin-abc/blob/174846aaaf56...

That's very interesting, thanks for linking to the code. Why would they require the first block to be >1MB?

I think if the block is >1MB, then that's at least one indication that BTC cannot possibly include it in its blockchain, and thus is a new blockchain entirely.

It's to make sure the block will be rejected by the non BCC nodes. This way you have a "clean cut": the Bitcoin Cash nodes rejecting the non-BCC blocks while segwit nodes reject the BCC fork because it starts with an invalid >1MB block.

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