
Bitcoin Is Likely to Split Again in November, Say Major Players - SirLJ
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-09-20/-bitcoin-jesus-ver-sees-the-digital-currency-splitting-again?utm_campaign=Newsletter%20-%20Mi5M%20-%20Q3%202017&utm_source=hs_email&utm_medium=email&utm_content=56513630&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-8-QQ7vx18x76ceiWWntmZ1Vr6OEXtg3X7pyUulL8EvgxPD88hJQq91e6Cg62XmvzOti1r1sMpDbYieDgQxLuFeW7QI6A&_hsmi=56513630
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dogruck
It will keep splitting as long as each split magically multiplies the notional
value.

~~~
brentis
In layman’s terms?

~~~
raesene6
In the last split people who held bitcoins got an equal quantity of "Bitcoin
cash", so if you had 1 BTC, after the split you had 1 BTC and 1 BCH.

Looking at [https://coinmarketcap.com/](https://coinmarketcap.com/) you can
see that each BCH is worth ~$500 (at the time of this comment) and the value
of BTC is higher after the split.

so in essence $8,154,513,572 of new value was created from nothing with the
split.

If the next split follow the same pattern, more money appears...

~~~
lost_name
It's interesting to say that $8B of new value was created, since no one could
supply that money if anyone asked for it.

How did the cryptocurrency markets handle that, anyway?

~~~
cloakandswagger
>since no one could supply that money if anyone asked for it

What does this mean? BCH can be sold for USD, and there are people willing to
buy BCH. Therefore BCH created $8B in new value.

~~~
SeoxyS
That's not exactly right. You have to consider the depth of the market and the
size of the demand. However many BCH are in existence, there's no way that the
market will support liquidating them all for USD. An order of that size would
crash the markets instantly.

The $8B in value created is entirely nominal, because of the size of the pre-
existing supply. In reply the real value created could well be negative or at
most in the millions and not billions.

~~~
cloakandswagger
So what you're saying is that the value of any asset that is not USD (stocks,
bonds, commodities, real estate) is completely unknown, and the real "value"
would be what that asset would sell for if every portion of it was instantly
liquidated tomorrow?

That's not how economics work.

edit: I suppose all these stocks I'm holding are worth $0, since if every
person selling them sold tomorrow the value would drop to that price.

~~~
SeoxyS
If you're going to put a specific value on something, it's be much more
accurate to calculate it as the sum of the entire demand for that something
divided by its quantity.

To take the 100 shares at $500 example from @stanmancan, if one person is
willing to pay $500, another 10 is willing to pay $400 for one share each, and
one more person is willing to pay $300 for 20 shares, and one large investor
is willing to buy up the rest for $100 only, the total demand for the whole
company is $14,400 for 100 shares or $144/share. That's the true value.

I can guarantee you that there isn't even an order of magnitude close to $8B
of demand for the artificially created and restricted BCH, so that value
wasn't really created.

~~~
stanmancan
I'm not sure that's accurate either. That just says that the people who want
to buy [Share|BTC|BCH|Whatever] value it less than those who currently hold
it.

~~~
SeoxyS
It's not perfect either, I agree. It's hard and subjective to define what the
real true value of something. But one common way is to define it as "what
someone will pay for it" \-- that's the math I did above.

Anyways, I'm not trying to argue that the value of that hypothetical company
is $14,400. I'm trying to argue that it's not anywhere near $50k. (Disproving
the GP's example that BCH created $8B of value overnight.)

------
Sargos
I know Bitcoin is still in development but if things like this keep happening
then it will never make it as a legitimate source of money. It's reputation is
already in the dumps and these splits just make it worse and worse.

~~~
tboyd47
How's that? Bitcoin's hard forks just tend to fizzle out into nothing.
Ethereum's chain has been switched out with via hard fork several times
already and people still love it.

~~~
zwily
... with the exception of Bitcoin Cash. It seems to be doing okay.

~~~
tboyd47
I prefer to measure success in network size rather than price, and Bitcoin ABC
(the only available node for BCH) seems to be comparable to Bitcoin Classic,
which had 2,000 full nodes running at its height, yet still seems to have
fizzled out.

------
redshark1802
bitcoin probably won't split again. Supporters of the initial proposal that
would lead to the split are already withdrawing from this commitment.
[https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/no2x-breaking-
bitcoin-s...](https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/no2x-breaking-bitcoin-
shows-no-love-segwit2x-hard-fork-paris/)

------
empath75
The more forks there are, the more laughable the idea that bitcoin is a
deflationary currency.

~~~
shp0ngle
But the one and only True Bitcoin is still deflationary.

Your opinion on which is the True Bitcoin might vary. It's one of them though.

~~~
tboyd47
This. Bitcoin Cash isn't intended as a complement to Bitcoin, but its
replacement. Either one of them wins or they all lose.

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andrewla
This split is fundamentally different because of the lack of replay
protection. On the other hand, it is more consensus-driven. At this point, if
the hashing power that is signaling Segwit2x follows the fork, and no replay
protection is provided (and no "emergency difficulty adjustment", a la Bitcoin
Cash), then we have 93% of the power following the fork, and only 7% staying
behind.

That means that block times will decrease 14-fold, and it will be 200 days
until the next difficulty adjustment. Since there's no replay protection,
there's no effective way to isolate "segwit2x" bitcoins from the
non-"segwit2x" bitcoins, so it seems infeasible to trade them separately and
let pricing data drive the mining decisions.

This split is much more likely to either go very smoothly -- old chain
completely abandoned, segwit2x is now bitcoin, or very disasterously --
becomes impossible to spend either bitcoins of sw2x-bitcoins because of the
chain overlap until the coinbase transactions start to mature.

~~~
runeks
[…] or very disasterously -- becomes impossible to spend either bitcoins of
sw2x-bitcoins because of the chain overlap until the coinbase transactions
start to mature.

Can you elaborate?

~~~
andrewla
The problem with a lack of replay protection (and this played out for a bit
after the ETH/ETC split) is that transactions that are valid on one chain are
valid on the other.

For convenience, let's call the chains BTC and SBT (for segwit2 bitcoin). If I
hold 10 BTC before the split, then I hold 10 BTC and 10 SBT after the split.
If I want to send 5 BTC to an address post-split, but hold on to my 5 SBT,
there's no way to do it. The transaction that sends 5 BTC can be "replayed"
onto the SBT fork, so the same address on the SBT side also receives my 5 SBT.

In the ETC/ETH split this was resolved by having a contract which split coins
into two addresses, depending on what side of the chain the contract was on;
so you would make a ETCETH deposit to this address and specify two output
addresses; one would receive the ETC and the other the ETH. This is not
possible in Bitcoin; the language is not powerful enough.

So to split your coins, you would need to get conflicting transactions
accepted by the two chains, and wait for that to settle. Once that's done, you
can move the remainder of your addresses by sending from the SBT address along
with a BTCSBT address, and sending from the BTC address along with a BTCSBT
address. This is pretty hairy for an individual user, and would probably have
to be mediated by a service (most likely operated by an exchange).

~~~
runeks
> So to split your coins, you would need to get conflicting transactions
> accepted by the two chains, and wait for that to settle.

Good point. I hadn’t thought of the possibility of having one part of a double
spend be confirmed on the main chain and the other part on the fork.

But I don’t see how it relates to the part I quoted.

~~~
andrewla
>> […] or very disasterously -- becomes impossible to spend either bitcoins of
sw2x-bitcoins because of the chain overlap until the coinbase transactions
start to mature.

> But I don’t see how it relates to the part I quoted.

My explanation covered the "impossible to spend either bitcoins [or]
sw2x-bitcoins" \-- the replay means that attempts to spend one spend the other
as well. Forcing a split transaction pair (as I describe above) is really the
only way to ensure that your BTC transaction won't spend your SBT as well.

Is it the bit about the coinbase transactions? The coinbase is the most
reliable way of getting transactions valid only on one side of the fork; the
mining rewards necessarily only apply to the chain on which they were mined.
They aren't spendable until 100 blocks after they are rewarded, and only after
they mix in sufficiently with other transactions can they be used to
differentiate general transactions -- any transaction that descends from a
coinbase transaction is also specific to the chain fork. This is more reliable
than a timing/sybil attack to try to force the split transaction pair
described above.

------
runeks
What’s the argument against increasing the block size limit to 2MB, from those
who oppose this?

I was under the impression that the original SegWit proposal increased the
block size limit anyway — albeit through a change in how it’s calculated, but
still.

~~~
alanfalcon
I asked this several times on r/bitcoin and just got links to a Core blog post
warning, “this isn’t something Core supports,” and (essentially) “hard forks
are confusing for users.” So if you blindly follow Core devs, then apparently
that’s enough “technical” reason for you.

[It seems to me that Core wants to keep small blocks so that fees on the
primary chain continue to rise and everyone is forced to use the side chains
that they are building and stand to profit handsomely from. They don’t want
people being able to use the main chain for small purchases because it
increases the size of the blockchain, which makes it more expensive to run
nodes, but realistically they’re simply making Bitcoin too expensive to use at
all.]

Anyway, I’m curious if your question can produce some more reasonable answers
here.

~~~
lawlessone
They're right about confusions, bitcoin cash is simple enough to understand if
you've been in this for a while but it's very confusing sometimes.

Some people think they're buying one when it's the other. Others have lost
money trying to set bitcoin from one branch to another.

These is also an argument that making the blocks bigger wont actually make a
difference.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox)

Sidechains will happen regardless.

------
marenkay
Isn't it obvious that it has to split a few more times? Unless it does it's
major investors would not be able to cash out.

The way I see it, Bitcoin works exactly like a classic pyramid schema. Only
interesting part of value IMHO is the Blockchain technology itself.

------
paulpauper
So does this mean more 'free money' for Bitcoin holders. yay

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ceejayoz
This is why you don't negotiate with terrorists, Coinbase.

~~~
hellbanner
Can you explain what you mean?

~~~
ceejayoz
Coinbase initially stated they weren't going to implement support for Bitcoin
Cash, then backpedaled when enough people complained.

[https://blog.coinbase.com/update-on-bitcoin-
cash-8a67a7e8dbd...](https://blog.coinbase.com/update-on-bitcoin-
cash-8a67a7e8dbdf)

As both Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash have done well post-fork, there's a serious
incentive for more forks, and forks of other coin types... and Coinbase's
compromising makes it much less tenable to say "no" next time.

