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Comment by blhack | Hacker News Reader

Here's the stickiest thing about this entire thing to me: the name.

Roger Ver (one of the people behind bcash) has said repeatedly that he believes that his fork deserves the name "Bitcoin" and that it is the "real" bitcoin. It seems obvious that the intent here is to confuse people.

This, to me, seems like blatant fraud. It is concerning to me that coinbase would continue to allow this market confusion to build by listing this under the name "bitcoin cash". Things like this make me long for better regulation in this space.

Full disclosure: I say this as somebody who holds both bitcoin and bcash in nearly equal amounts. I mean to say that I don't really have a dog in this fight.

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I have neither, Why can't he call his fork Bitcoin Cash? He claims that it adheres to the Bitcoin.org idea than BTC.

Him & a vocal community (/r/btc) appears to believe in that. What gives BTC (and /r/bitcoin) the right to the name Bitcoin considering both are forks from the original chain?

You can create a fork today but should you be allowed to take the bitcoin name? Leave the name with the existing entity.

The point is that Bitcoin Core is as much of a fork as Bitcoin Cash.

You're mixing up soft fork with a hard fork and implying that soft fork is somewhat better, when in reality it is just technical concept and has nothing to do with it.

Actually in current situation we already have example, the soft fork (SegWit) implements a complex mechanism to add segregation witness feature and allow for off-chain transactions.

The change in Bitcoin Cash is simply raising the block limit to 8MB. In fact initially bitcoin had no limit for the block size and the limit was added to prevent DDoS.

That limit was meant to be increased as there would be higher demand.

That is not true. Initially Bitcoin crashed when blocks went over a couple of hundred kilobyes. Satoshi put in this hard cap when this inadvertent limit was fixed.

One is the fork and the other is the original. By not taking the Bitcoin name the Bitcoin Cash group has already admitted that they are the fork. They should be proud about it and give themselves a new name that stands for their ideals.

That said I personally don't believe that the name will make a difference in this battle.

In terms of how chain splits work there is not a technical differentiation between a "fork" and the "original". In the case of the hard fork on block 478559 there was a pretty significant change to the consensus rules (EDA, 8MB blocks & no segwit).

What happened on block 494782 was also a fork in some respects, there was well telegraphed plans to change the consensus rules on that block, but no one mined/accepted blocks with those rules.

Right now if you run an ancient bitcoin node it will still see the segwit addresses and the real Bitcoin chain as valid just fine. It cannot follow the BCash chain because it's not a valid chain to it. Also, the Bitcoin project has been marching along same as always, it seems disingenuous to claim that the original is a fork when it's the same exact project and it is still a valid chain for every Bitcoin node out there. I think it goes without saying that the original Bitcoin project should be considered the rightful owners of the trademark "Bitcoin" regardless of whether or not they legally own the trademark for it.

Well, it should mostly see the real Bitcoin chain as valid until it doesn't. Older full nodes have a bug where they can't handle chain reorganisations properly with blocks that are the full 1MB in size, so the moment they see an orphaned block they break horribly. (Relatedly, if any big block pusher argues increasing the block size is just a simple matter of changing a few constants, that's a good sign they don't know what they're talking about.)

Ah, good point I remember something about that bug a number of years back. Point being SegWit is designed to be compatible with old versions of Bitcoin. Bugs aside it's still a valid chain, old Bitcoin nodes just break on blocks that are considered valid by their own rules.

That is a point that can not be overstated.

You own your Bitcoins in the full meaning of the word. You fully control them, by way of your private key, but you also trust that the rules of Bitcoin won't change. The former ownership is technical but the latter is social.

There is an implicit social contract towards anyone who buys Bitcoin to be able to spend them any time in the future, under the same rules as today. That includes not having to upgrade to another ruleset with arbitrary changes.

For this reason it was important that the block size increase was made opt-in, and that any hard forking fundamental changes that are required in the future are trivial or have pretty much unanimous support.

I think you're being disingenuous. "bcash" has become a derogatory term and your use of it belies your bias. Do you also rail against Bitcoin Gold, BitcoinDark, Bitcoin Plus, eBitcoin, BitcoinZ, Bitcoin Red, Bitcoin Scrypt...? Or only the one that threatens Bitcoin's HODL culture?

I think it's worth pointing out that "bcash" was something coined by the bcash community. The only notable opposition to it was by Roger Ver because he wanted his fork to have the name "Bitcoin" in it. I don't think it helps anything to accuse the poster of being disingenuous for using a term that the community themselves came up with.

What? That's absolutely not the case. You're spreading a complete lie.

You're right. We are witnessing some serious fanaticism here. It's kind of disgusting.

To clarify, I was referring to /r/btc where I lurk from time to time. There were plenty of people bikeshedding over the name but Roger Ver is the only notable public figure who has thrown a temper tantrum over the name. Just because now everyone wants to claim that "BCash" is a propagation campaign just because Roger is hysterical over it doesn't mean that BCash wasn't coined in /r/btc back over the summer.

No one in /r/btc or the Bitcoin Cash community calls it 'bcash'. Totally disingenuous.

That's not true, there's a handful of people that now want to call it BCash just because it annoys Roger Ver. People in /r/btc that support it. Just because they want to annoy Roger Ver does not mean that they aren't a part of the community anymore and it doesn't mean that they oppose it.

But as it were I'm not suggesting that the majority are calling it anything other than "Bitcoin Cash" for months now. I'm just pointing out that when Bitcoin ABC was new members of /r/btc were pointing out how that name was confusing and that is where BitCash and BCash were originally coined. Go to /r/btc and look at the posts from back then if you don't believe me, people were posting about coming up with a better name. Those posts weren't just some Bitcoin Project conspiracy, they were from members of the community that wanted a better name. Personally, I don't care what they want to do. They are free to come up with whatever cryptocurrency floats their boat and it doesn't bother me in the slightest. However, the fact that it annoys Roger Ver makes me really want to refer to it as BCash.

No that's a lie. No one on /r/btc supports that name. It's official name is Bitcoin Cash by its supporters.

I had to look it up, because as an outsider this argument is surreal to me. And sure enough, if you go in /r/btc and perform a search for the term “bcash”, there are pages of results that show the community at large generally hates the term.

Seems a little extreme to me but it is what it is, I guess.

I totally agree with that, I'm not trying to claim that the community as a whole currently likes or supports the name BCash, just that it wasn't "the other side" that originally came up with it like so many people claim.

To me it seems like Bitcoin Cash profits greatly just from having the word "Bitcoin" in front of it. Surprised no one just copyrights it and sues other coin makers. I guess that's against he community, but imo it needs to be done.

I don't hold any bitcoin or bitcoin cash...I say this as just a general consumer. The "bitcoin" name has brand value, and having "bitcoin" cash is going to inflate the market value of the it and confuse consumers into thinking some coins are more trustworthy. Especially as this goes more mainstream and your Aunt and Grandma can buy BCH on Coinbase. Or whatever new altcoin comes up that tags on the words "bitcoin."

Not really. There's Bitcoin Gold, Bitcoin Diamond, Bitcoin Ruby, Bitcoin Plus... the list goes on and on but the 'Bitcoin' name hasn't helped any of them much.

"Bitcoin gold" is currently the #10 largest cryptocurrency.

#10 doesn't mean much because the liquidity and popularity drop off exponentially after the top 4.

He's not entirely wrong though. What defines the real Bitcoin: The network's hash rate? The developers behind the Qt wallet? Adoption/usage?

What defines anything? You could spend a lifetime on this problem.

Bitcoin has a continuity in price, in name, in code, in software, all the way back to when people first started talking about it in 2009.

The idea that bcash is and always has been bitcoin is betrayed by the simple fact that there isn't a continuity in price back to the genesis.

And that continuity can split and move back-and-forth between forks, as they gain or lose support.

The sum of XBT+BCH price on exchanges fluctuated less than either coin alone.

Are you trying to say that the price of bitcoin crashed from ~$3000 to ~$300 immediately on August 1st 2017, and that coincidentally at the same time, a brand new asset appeared that had the same price that bitcoin did a few seconds earlier?

That's just absolutely absurd.

> That's just absolutely absurd.

If you run a website and your database gets pwned by hackers, do you just give up and say oh well, I guess the pwned version is the real version now? No, you restore from a backup, and if that involves recreating some of your integrations with third-party providers then so be it.

except that it's not hackers, but somebody else claiming to own the website.

It split into ~$2700 plus ~$300. Not sure what the exact numbers were, but there was a clear pattern of one falling as the other rose, and same thing the other way around.

It seems like one of the disadvantages of Satoshi being anonymous is that Bitcoin wasn't trademarked, which allows for forks like Bitcoin Cash to use the name Bitcoin. I think this is kind of an interesting case of why trademarks are important as having both Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash must be very confusing to new users on Coinbase.

At least when governments fork Bitcoin and force people and financial organizations to use it instead of other digital currencies, they can still call it Bitcoin legally.

I've said this before -- but this fork should have broken the illusion that people had that bitcoins are rare. If viable forks are possible, then they will continue to happen, each of them increasing the number of 'bitcoins' in circulation.

Good thing it's not viable then...?

Each fork will need to serve a niche to get attention. That's still a high bar to set. A number of forks have been created that have next to no value or interest.

You are extrapolating from a single fork that had a lot of specific circumstances behind it.

If you were right, we would have seen many successful copycat forks since then, but we haven't.

Bitcoin Cash is the real Bitcoin. They should just change the forked version to BCore or BStream, so as not to confuse people.

Bitcoin Classic, like an original product that was brought back due to marketing creating demand.

Original Recipe Bitcoin

I said it before and I’ll say it again, block size increase alone is not sustainable. The BCash boyz are stubborn and in denial. Might work for now but in the long term they will need another fork to increase the block size again and so on. They don’t have a Lightning Network either which is already available on Bitcoin Testnet and proved to be extremely fast (almost instant) at very low cost. I hold both but I’m realistic. I only hold BCash because I know the price is being pumped so I’ll make some money with it.

And bcash isn't even living up to its claims right now.

People are trying to move their coins out of storage onto exchanges, and seeing about an hour before they even get 1 confirmation.

It looks like the actual block size limit that most miners are using on Bitcoin Cash right now is 2MB, which isn't so much of an increase from Bitcoin at all. (The odd ones out are BTC.com with a 4MB limit and ViaBTC which has the full 8.) The new Cash difficulty algorithm also has an unfortunate tendency to oscillate when there's a sudden change in price relative to Bitcoin's price.

Also, Bitcoin Cash supporters have a habit of... well, frankly, outright lying sometimes. They were still pushing the idea it was faster than Bitcoin back when it was running at hours per block most of the time, and the usual response to people who discovered this was to tell them that the block time varied and was as low as a minute per block. This was technically true - in fact, often an equal number of blocks were produced at the minutes per block and hours per block rate, in alternating 144 block chunks of each. Can you perhaps see the problem here?

> block size increase alone is not sustainable

Then they can just implement Segwit. I'm not really seeing the problem here. One version of Bitcoin works today, the other doesn't. It's not really that complicated.

It was hard enough to get the support required to implement SegWit on Bitcoin proper, even though it had a far more immediate need for it. Bitcoin Cash was literally founded for the purpose of avoiding SegWit and making the Lightning Network impossible. The idea that all its supporters will suddenly see the light of SegWit is implausible.

Most Bitcoin Cash supporters supported Segwit, they just didn’t support Core artificially limiting the block size to force people to use their proprietary solution and then lying about it.

Bitcoin Cash is the forked version, you're getting them mixed up.

There were about 11 hard forks to Bitcoin before Bitcoin Cash was created - some of them temporarily decreasing the block size with the intention of putting it back into place when needed. BTC veered from that intention.

11! Please inform me of these, they must have been very, very early, I'm only aware of the Berkley DB bug.

Rather than engage in an argument on semantics let's look at the facts of the matter. The Bitcoin project has been the organization behind the official Bitcoin client since Satoshi was still around. If you were to start up an ancient Bitcoin client today it would follow the Bitcoin project's chain. The BCash chain would be considered invalid as it does not conform to the restrictions of a valid block according to the ancient Bitcoin client. The Bitcoin project chain would still be considered a valid chain. Contrary to most of the FUD around Segwit, the reason why it is considered a soft fork is because while it is a change in what constitutes a valid block, it does not violate any of the previous rules for a valid block.

It deserves the name because it has devs actually interested in turning it into the original vision of bitcoin.

Vs a store of value that just racks up transaction fees.

It's really an open question which one is the "real" Bitcoin and merits having "Bitcoin" in the name.

It's like saying that the People's Front of Judea is fraudulent because they don't really represent Judeans like the Judean People's Front.

One possible way to distinguish between both would be continuity: if you had a Bitcoin node running several months before the announcement, and kept running the same unchanged software until today, which one would your node be following now? That one probably has a bigger claim to both being the "real" Bitcoin, and having the plain unadorned "Bitcoin" name.

As to whether it merits having "Bitcoin" in the name, both are close enough that one could be considered a small variant of the other. That might be enough for the other one to merit being called "Bitcoin something".

I think of cryptocurrency as a wild wild west of high risk investing (aka gambling). Companies like Coinbase is in the business of selling you wagons and oxen so you can participate if you wish. I think the real problem is that this became a gold rush, so too many people who don't know what they're doing are participating.

It's not Coinbase's job to come up with the name and symbol for coins.

Which one is closest to the original design?

Probably the one that isn't owned by two wealthy elite individuals...

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