
The Bitcoin Cash Flippening - 0-o
http://www.bchflippening.com/
======
Meekro
Here's the super-summarized story for those who are out of the loop: the
Bitcoin community has been fighting for years over what they call the "block
size increase." From its original design, Bitcoin has capped each block to
1MB, which effectively caps the transactions per second to 4 or so. Raising
this limit would allow more transactions per second onto the network, but with
the downside of making nodes in the Bitcoin network more costly to operate.
The majority of current Bitcoin developers do not want to raise this cap.
However, a large group of users and several of the earliest developers
(including Gavin Andresen, the guy hand-picked by Satoshi Nakamoto) do want to
raise it. There is evidence that Satoshi himself thought that the cap should
someday be raised.

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.

~~~
econner
Thanks for the overview. Very helpful to someone w/ no previous knowledge.

Why did the majority of developers not want to raise the block size? / How
exactly does it make nodes much more expensive to operate?

~~~
Meekro
Each node in Bitcoin's P2P network has to store a copy of every transaction
since the beginning of time. This currently takes 140GB of disk space and is
growing by 5GB per month. If more transactions are allowed to go through,
it'll grow even faster. If it grows to extremely large numbers, only those who
can afford the huge disk arrays will be able to run a node.

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.

~~~
ajmurmann
Trying to work around the problem of all part transactions having to be
present on a node by limiting the number of transactions that can happen
honestly sounds like a silly joke. The entire point of any currency is easy,
cheap and fast transactions.

~~~
Anderkent
> The entire point of any currency is easy, cheap and fast transactions.

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.

~~~
ajmurmann
For a long time one of the big promises of Bitcoin was that you can easily,
cheaply and quickly transfer them even to people in other countries. I assume
the benefits you are referring to are political? Like lack of central per
controlling it? If so, I don't think that will run over every day Joe.

------
Anderkent
What does that mean? What's the 46% supposed to represent

~~~
mrb
[https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/7ccohu/comment/dpp0sq6](https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/7ccohu/comment/dpp0sq6)

« _The percentage represents how close BCH is to reaching half of the combined
market cap of BTC and BCH._ »

$30B / ($130B/2) = 46%

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sillysaurus3
57 days ago, I said that it would be a good time to buy Bitcoin. If you'd
listened to me, you could have made some serious cash since then.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15259134](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15259134)

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.

~~~
laichzeit0
Right now is as stupid time to consider getting rich off Bitcoin. Even if the
price doubles or triples, you'll only make 100 or 200%. That might seem like a
really good investment. Maybe if you put down $100,000. Otherwise, it doesn't
mean much. The risk is too high.

Back when it was $10 or $40, it was a great speculation. The ship has long
since sailed.

~~~
icelancer
>>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.

------
econner
Why was this flagged?

~~~
0-o
Probably because of ideology. A lot of bitcoiners don't want to see the flip
happen.

~~~
pmorici
Funny thing is if you have been holding Bitcoin since at least Aug. None of
this affects you because you got an equal amount of Bitcoin Cash and the
combined value of Bitcoin Core + Bitcoin Cash has hardly budged from all time
highs.

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.

------
carvalho
Edit: ...

~~~
pmorici
Pretty simple really the community has been clamoring for a block size
increase for years now and the devs have been actively fighting it. They
managed to create enough division in the community to scuttle the last
compromise (Segwit2x) and now people are rotating en-mass to Bitcoin Cash
which has the larger blocks they want and doesn't have the divisive
developers.

Very little surprising about this at all except for maybe the speed with which
it is happening.

~~~
icelancer
>>now people are rotating en-mass to Bitcoin Cash which has the larger blocks
they want and doesn't have the divisive developers.

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.

