New fake SegWit2X: premining millions | Hacker News Reader

New fake SegWit2X: premining millions

github.com

48 pointsjasonjmcghee16 comments

Again, I'll repost what I posted in another thread this morning:

This Segwit2X has almost nothing to do with the original "Segwit2X". They are basically taking what they think is the good parts of all cryptocurrencies, and are putting it into one monstrosity.

- X11 based algorithm from DASH

- 2.5 minute blocktime from litecoin

- 4mb (closer to 8mb with segwit) blocksize from Bitcoin Cash

- difficulty adjustment algorithm from Bitcoin Cash

Plus they are promising some pretty impossible stuff in the "future":

- ZkSnarks from ZCash (which they list on the same line as "anonymous transactions" in some areas, and on a different line in others...)

- Lightning Network from Bitcoin

- Smart contracts from ETH

- Something called "offline codes" which god only knows what it means

Basically it's a shitcoin that is trying to lure people in with impossible promises and just taking what they think is the best thing from every major cryptocurrency and putting it into one disgusting abomination.

Oh, and they chose a loaded name to make sure they'd get some coverage in the "news".

This "Segwit2X" has literally nothing in common with the previous "Segwit2X" from november except for the name. Nothing else is the same. How they got any exchanges to list it under the same name i'll never know...

Hopefully they can do a better job than Jeff Garzik's previous B2X shitcoin.

Just tell me how to claim these new coins and convert them to BTC once they are worth a bit (price usually spikes just after the fork). I'm extremely sceptical of altcoins which fork off of the Bitcoin blockchain, but welcome the free contribution to my retirement fund.

I am less skeptical of coins which split from the bitcoin blockchain than coins which are entirely new.

By splitting from the bitcoin blockchain, the authors of said coin have no easy way to 'premine' or get any other kind of 'first in' benefit without it being visible in the transaction history (like this is).

That should help the coin succeed on technical merits alone, rather than PR/marketing stunts and pump and dump schemes which work much better on new coins.

It also prevents 'coin inflation', where value gets split across a potentially infinite number of coins. By splitting from the original blockchain, businesses which don't want to take a risk on which coin/coins will succeed can simply demand equal amounts of every coin (or take payment in one coin, and then diversify into equal amounts of every coin). People who hold coins take no risk if additional coins fork off.

You can premine chain splits. See bitcoin gold, which had a premine of 100k coins, or the very coin this thread is about, with a premine of millions.

You can't secretly do it though.

With a new coin on a fresh chain, a premine can be secret, and outsiders can't tell the difference between a premine and the initial few users.

Oh, I see what you mean.

> How they got any exchanges to list it under the same name i'll never know...

I think this is the real hack, perhaps exploiting exchange sites that would for some reason auto-list a bitcoin knockoff (noting from the comments that the fork pre-mined the forkers 6,000,000 coin)

Imagine if in the real world we would have people come up with new metals to compete with gold, silver, platinum, etc. as viable stores of value. This dilution and unlimited supply of cryptocurrency types will not be good for Bitcoin in the long run.

>Imagine if in the real world we would have people come up with new metals to compete with gold, silver, platinum, etc. as viable stores of value.

Like dollars, euros, pounds, etc...

What evidence have you seen that suggests this project is remotely a viable store of value?

Massive and growing consensus and significant transfer of representative value from FIAT.

Bitcoin's store of value proposition comes from two things.

It's controlled issuance schedule and two the hash scarcity from mining. You can clone a coin a million times but you cannot duplicate hash scarcity.

What you describe is not unlike the coin debasement that occurred during the latter period of the Roman Empire. However, unlike coin debasement, forking a cryptocurrency imposes no requirement to actually use it.

Actually it's an excellent feature of the ecosystem. Consider the old "cross of gold" canard, the accusation is that the economic powers that be were inhibiting cooperation and productive investment by monopolising and artificially controlling the money supply, restricting it to manufacture recessions and flooding it to manufacture booms. The proposed solution was silver backed money at the time, which was vigorously opposed, eventually successfully, by the parties which held control of the gold supply at the time.

What if it wasn't just two widely held and distributed elements they had to corner the market on and maintain supply control for, but practically any arbitrary blockchain that someone believes is necessary given the lack of availability in the other forms of money in present circulation. It makes it much harder to manufacture recessions when your target audience can simply mint their own uncensorable high quality cryptocurrency out of widely available code by simply tweaking a few variables to fit their purposes.

At the same time it doesn't take away from the value proposition of more established cryptocurrencies, because it is always obvious that these alternative chains are not units of the original currencies from which they were spawned. If people truly are simply trying to pointlessly expand the money supply for no reason, then the market will eventually punish them as that money is used in economically unproductive pursuits.

When all is said and done, a blockchain is just a globally available tamperproof digital ledger. And given that territory, you can build any given economy on top of it.

So that explains the bizarre email I got from Yobit today:

Bitcoin Segweet in 18 hrs!

Dear YoBit Users!

Bitcoin Segweet [B2X] balances (1:1 btc) will be added in 18 hrs (27 dec)

Timer: https://yobit.net/en/b2x/timer/

Sincerely yours, Team of Yobit.Net

It's a junk exchange anyway, but now seems like a good time to reiterate my question from the other day, which started an interesting discussions but not actually an answer: who exactly is buying into these junk forks, when there are high-quality altcoins on the market?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com