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Comment by jahbrewski | Hacker News Reader

Can someone provide a summary explaining the significance of this event?

There are two incompatible "kinds" of bitcoin now because people disagreed about how to scale the technology.

Is it clear which fork was followed by most of the people?

There are several factors at play. First is that BCH is a hard fork, and thus miners need to actively choose to mine BCH instead of BTC. Exchanges need to add support for BCH. You can also look at hash rates, which show how much mining power is behind either coin. You can also look at transaction rates and exchange rates.

Despite all this, market forces may drive one or the other coin up or down over the next days and months depending on how important the differing features are to the community. It could also turn out that there is a market for both feature sets and they both do well.

By default people that don't change to a BCC client will follow the legacy chain, so if BCC is going to be dominant it will take a while to find out most likely. The price is likely to be very volatile while the market figures out which it wants to follow more.

Outside the bitcoin community? Not much.

Inside? First salvo in a massive political civil war between interests with different goals. There's this Bitcoin Cash implementation vs Segwit.

The first salvo was called Bitcoin XT. And the second was called Bitcoin Classic. And the third was called Bitcoin Unlimited.

And really, there were lots of skirmishes before any of that even. This is a long, old battle, and the fork is more like a resolution (two sides peacefully going their separate ways) than a continuation of the war.

I'd say it's only a resolution if the fork stays strong and has strong growth.

If it doesn't (and it's far too early to tell) then this schism isn't going to go away. It might end up moot but right now this isn't resolved, it's just a big push.

Fair, but the Segwit vs this is the current battle at least.

It's also the largest in a long while.

Can you mention some of the salvos fired by your side?

Such as? If there are any complaints against Bitcoin Core it is that they have been ignoring this issue, not fighting battles.

Gavin, a bitcoin developer, Satoshi Nakamoto himself gave commit access rights to Gavin.

They have not been ignoring this issue, they have been firing salvos and censorship left and right. Fighting the original bitcoin with all they had.

Gavin setup the github repo. So I guess he granted himself commit rights? But in any case I'm not sure what you're trying to say.

No longer a civil war at this point. The coin forked.

That's still a civil war. If the fork doesn't get/stay strong you think this will go away?

It's just a strategy. Granted, it's a good one.

It's like Brexit but for Bitcoin.

For years the market wanted to increase the arbitrary 1mb blocksize limit. They finally got fed up with the stalling/lies and forked off.

people were misled into thinking Hard forks and >1mb blocksize was "dangerous". Bitcoin cash proves these to be false.

>a few hours in

>nothing bad happened

>"it's totally fine guys"

I mean, you can say the same about a lot of disasters

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