Bitcoin Cash Skyrockets, Bitcoin Price Drops As Civil War Continues

It's a big circle jerk that ends up promoting broken technology. Yes, great to be away from the politics, but no, not a good place to learn cryptocurrency design.

Communties obout altcoins with master nodes are quite interesting as well and quite friendly. Dash comes to mine. Or the fresher and promissing vivo.

If too many people move to one chain, the speculative expected outcome of the other chain will rise, leading some people to switch back, etc.

This is the very reason why Bitcoin works.

So just looking at it from pure utilitarian view BCH is superior, but BTC team has a point too, because the larger block size does mean it has higher chance of being centralized.

The thing is, nobody knows if this will actually result in centralization, nor does anyone know if being moderately centralized will be as bad as we expect. Anyone claiming to know what will happen is either ignorant or a liar.

Anyway, to make my point clear, let's imagine BCH does succeed and end up dominating and BTC dies off. There's a chance that BCH will lead to centralization and won't be so different from what the Internet ended up becoming. If you look at how the Internet works nowadays, it's extremely centralized from top layer all the way to the bottom. For example DNS companies can ban certain organizations from existing online simply because there are so few DNS companies, and your ISP can monitor all your traffic and sue you if you download something on Torrent. And Facebook and Google owns everyone's attention online, etc.

People who resist BCH are those who think BCH will end up evolving in that direction and kill off BTC in the process because obviously it's much more user friendly.

If something like this happens, it's good to have an alternative which has equivalent influence. Also having a competition plays into the game theory of how each party will behave going forward. They won't be able to make drastic decisions if they have a close competitor. I don't think Ethereum is it even though I'm super bullish on Ethereum, because Ethereum is an entirely different beast.

The r/bitcoin and r/btc sub-reddits really went to trash recently. Everyone's been bickering about their own opinions. Worst of all, constant front page vitriol about each other.

I don't know what this fixation is on hashrate. As long as it doesn't drop to low enough a level for someone who wants to attack it to be successful, it doesn't make any difference to the coin's functionality.

Anyone with the ability to buy or sell a large amount of crypt can manipulate the markets. This holds doubly true in the middle of the night on a weekend.

I'm curious about historic precedents - I really don't know much about the history of currency. There must have been analogues in the past - I know Isaac Newton famously went to war with counterfeiters, but that (and vague memories of hearing about bank currency in the US) about the only instance of currency competition I know of.

Anyone want to recommend a quality book on the topic?

That happened when BCH was new. What happened then was that everyone switched to BTC, the BCH chain stopped completely for a few hours, and then BCH's extra difficulty adjustment rule kicked in and lowered the difficulty a lot, so everyone switched to BCH again. That oscillation was leading to periods of nearly zero blocks and periods of nearly a block per minute for the BCH chain. To prevent that, some BCH supporters left enough miners in the BCH chain that the extra difficulty adjustment rule didn't kick in, even when it was less profitable.

From what I've read, this time there's a difference: in a few days, BCH (or at least some of it) will have a hardfork which changes the extra difficulty adjustment rule. I haven't seen a good explanation of the new rule so far (only complaints that it was unilaterally decided by some developers), but depending on how it works this might be the last time miners can get thousands of blocks in a few days, which would explain why this time there's so much hash power in the BCH chain. And depending on how it works, there might be no longer a need for BCH supporters to keep enough miners in the BCH chain to prevent the extra difficulty adjustment rule from kicking in, so it's even possible that every miner switches to BTC at once.

On the other hand, if the new extra difficulty adjustment rule works, jumping from one chain to the other might become less profitable, so some miners might decide to stay on the BCH chain permanently. These miners might be now selling their BTC for BCH, which would neatly explain the rise in the BCH price and the drop in the BTC price.

I find the supposed "voting power" of the miners to be a mirage. When it comes down to it they just follow the money.

Neither hashpower nor price make it the winner. In the long term, actual people wanting to hold & use it makes a winner. Price and hashpower follow that.

Which says:

> We agree to immediately support the following parallel upgrades to the bitcoin protocol, which will be deployed simultaneously and based on the original Segwit2Mb proposal:

- Activate Segregated Witness at an 80% threshold, signaling at bit 4

- Activate a 2 MB hard fork within six months

Where does Bitcoin Cash fit in here, and what's going to happen when the exchanges start honouring it? Was BCH the hard fork they talked about? What hasn't been honoured yet?

Also, comments like "if you understand the technical implications of it then you should have a very clear idea about what is going to happen" are really unhelpful, like a no-op soaked in condescension.

Also, it's misleading to say that large blocks make bitcoin centralized. Even with large blocks, there will still be enough players that the ledger is still protected through proof of work. In any case the hashing power remains centralized regardless of block size.

You are misunderstanding the meaning of the word "decentralized" when it comes to blockchains. It doesn't mean "available to be run by the masses". It refers to the solving of the Byzantine General problem through proof of work to prevent tampering and double spend, which would still function fine even if only a few thousand nodes existed around the world.

You could have the consensus rules take the block height into consideration, so blocks after a certain # must be under X MB, but previous blocks can be up to Y MB.

https://bitcoinfees.earn.com/

Even gold can do that better.

As fees get higher, those addresses become unspendable.

Another way of looking at this is to observe the market cap of both currencies after a fork; in theory you'd expect the total market cap to remain unchanged, since the newly forked currency is presumably either worthless OR has worth only to the extent that it removes value from the original currency. In practice, this doesn't seem to be occurring.

Is that no longer a thing? Does the cryptocurrency community acknowledge that their product is just a big gambling machine requiring the energy a medium country?

I recently was listening to a podcast (Sam Harris maybe?) where they were talking about the possibility of super intelligent AI being set to a complex task... but then finds itself spending some huge amount of resources churning out paperclips because of some erroneous assumptions about their value to solution.

If we're the super intelligent AI designed by some other "real" intelligence for a purpose, I'd say cryptocurrency is our paperclip moment.

> Speculation is unquestionably a good thing.

Maybe, but usual only if the resulting volatility results in lower price for the consumer, or makes a market.

But then again, BTC has no market for goods nor services compared to the currency it is bought and sold with (its legitimate non-fictional market is so low as to be non-existent).