The Bitcoin Cash Flippening
bchflippening.com
bchflippening.com
There was recently a compromise struck among the largest bitcoin exchanges and mining pools. It was called the Silbert Agreement, or New York Agreement, or Segwit2x. The agreement was to deploy a feature upgrade that the current developers had been pushing (called Segwit) alongside a block size increase from 1MB to 2MB. It broke a stalemate in which the big blockers had been preventing Segwit from going live, and the Segwit supporters had been refusing to increase the block size.
The deal was that Segwit would go live immediately, and several months later, the block size increase would go live. Segwit did go live as agreed, but then its proponents refused to honor the rest of the agreement (since they already got what they wanted).
That was a few days ago, and now we're seeing the backlash: lots of users and capital fleeing to "Bitcoin Cash," a separate branch that recently forked off from the traditional Bitcoin. Proponents (including Gavin Andresen) consider this new branch to be the true Bitcoin, because it's willing to scale with user demand as Satoshi Nakamoto intended. Opponents consider it to be an altcoin that's fraudulently calling itself Bitcoin, since its block size increase is a departure from the original spec.
Why did the majority of developers not want to raise the block size? / How exactly does it make nodes much more expensive to operate?
The direction of development is really controlled by a handful of people and they also have control of 3 of the historically important Bitcoin discussion forums so they were able to control the narrative for years and push out anyone who brought up contrarian opinions on the block size.
The fear is that eventually, only major companies and universities will be running Bitcoin nodes. This could make it easier for governments to threaten all involved parties into changing or dismantling the system.
However, those who want to raise the block size say that government agents threatening Bitcoin node operators is not a realistic fear. Whereas, if transactions can't go through because the network refuses to scale, then businesses will abort their plans to accept Bitcoin. To big blockers, such a scaling failure is much more likely to kill Bitcoin than government agents in dark suits.
All of those are relative, and part of tradeoffs with other values. If you think those are the only important properties of a currency, you're missing the entire motivation behind crypto currencies.
BCH liquidity is a fraction of BTC. If you are the owner of BCH because you held BTC at the time of the fork, there 's little chance you have gone to the trouble to copy wallets to a separate computer, move your original coins (to prevent a double spend) and install a BCH wallet.
«The percentage represents how close BCH is to reaching half of the combined market cap of BTC and BCH.»
$30B / ($130B/2) = 46%
Back then, the price dropped to around $3k. One of the questions was "What makes now a good time to buy?" And the answer was simply "Bitcoin has been crashing."
The counterintuitive thing is, if you want to get into bitcoin, you need to wait for a crash and then buy.
Bitcoin is crashing. Again, it's a good time to buy.
If you were paying attention to the s2x cancellation and were a first mover into BCH and out of BTC you are making a killing right now.
It's simply hard to assign logical motives to overall movements in the market. As scientific minded individuals, we would love to believe there must be a motive. But sometimes there isn't one.
I think what's been happening is that the price has been going up and up, and it's been looking for an excuse to unwind. We're seeing it unwind now. That means the time to get in is now.
You should be equally suspicious of my words too, though. That's the tough part about trying to call the market. I'm just admitting it's hard.
Back when it was $10 or $40, it was a great speculation. The ship has long since sailed.
Has it? Many learned people believe BTC's ceiling is in the five digits. And back when it was $10-40, no one would believe you that it would go to $6000-8000.
The only thing we know about BTC and cryptocurrency in general is that we're looking at serious variance, regardless.
Some people said their Bitcoin Cash was "free money" and sold it instead of seeing it for what it was, a hedge against developer hubris. Those folks that sold aren't in a good place right now.
Very little surprising about this at all except for maybe the speed with which it is happening.
This isn't entirely objective. BCH has 25% of its market cap trading today in volume. There's something weird going on. As for the developers, BCH has very little Github activity while Core is being actively worked on and improved.
I don't have a horse in this fight as I am into other cryptocurrencies but your statement is not very fair.