Comment by fpgaminer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fpgaminer | Hacker News Reader

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Something very important that I don't see advertised, with regard to BCH. The primary client, BitcoinABC, completely changed consensus rules a mere 5 days before the hardfork:

https://github.com/Bitcoin-ABC/bitcoin-abc/blob/174846aaaf56...

The important bit:

> Enforce strong replay protection (require SIGHASH_FORKID and SCRIPT_VERIFY_STRICTENC compliance)

That completely changes the consensus rules of BCH. Again, 5 days before a hardfork. 5 days.

I just ... I can't wrap my brain around why _anyone_ in their right mind would think that BCH should be worth anything, if this is the acumen of the development team.

Why would any exchange trust the code? Why would users trust the code?

If BCH is any kind of experiment, it's not an experiment of big-block vs small block (Bitcoin has had bigger block functionality for over 6 months now). It's an experiment to see if cowboy programmers can patch a live $40 billion network willy nilly and convince everyone that that's okay.

If anything the fact that things are working as intended(so far) proves that such a change is not nearly as dangerous as BCC developers make it out to be.

If you don't trust the code powering BCH then you can simply ignore all your coins on BCH and pretend they don't exist, you're in the exact same situation as you were yesterday.

The fear mongering of 'all hard forks are dangerous' is just that, fear mongering, and has no basis in actual reality.

It's been working as intended for, what, a few hours? If every flaw was guaranteed to show up in that time then five days would be more than enough - just run a few hours of testing before launch, done. The scary flaws are the ones that take weeks or months to show up, or that don't appear at all until someone starts actively exploiting them.

I agree with the fearmongering bit, but ignoring BCH is a little more difficult. BCH just caused a pretty decent dip in the price of BTC, and will likely make it drop further.

Unless it crashes and burns, in which case faith in Core will be even stronger.

5% at Bitcoin's level of volatility is not a dip.

BCC is bitconnect[0], did you mean BTC (Bitcoin) or BCH (Bitcoin-Cash)?

>If anything the fact that things are working as intended(so far) proves that such a change is not nearly as dangerous as BCC developers make it out to be.

A single round of russian roulette[1] where no one dies is not proof that guns are harmless. Things work out until they don't. We should always avoid unnecessary risks even if we have been lucky in the past.

[0]: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitconnect/

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_roulette

He seems to have meant Bitcoin Core. There is no pure "Bitcoin" any more.

Big blocker frustration has been bottled up for years and now it's all coming out at once. It's going to be messy.

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