
The first Bitcoin Cash block has been mined - TekMol
http://blockdozer.com/insight/block/000000000000000000651ef99cb9fcbe0dadde1d424bd9f15ff20136191a5eec
======
dang
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14899881](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14899881)
is related.

------
aresant
Most fascinating to me has been Coinbase's position throughout this.

Which was essentially they are treating the new Bitcoin cash as a shitcoin,
aka not supporting it.

They took the position that if you want your "free" Bitcoin Cash, move your
BTC out of Coinbase.(1)

This led to the inevitable service decay & delays that CoinBase has become
well known for in the bitcoin community whenever leading up to a high volume
event. (2)

And yet their internal PR team has given somewhat measured responses that "if
Coinbase decides to support Bitcoin Cash in the future, it will distribute the
balances that accrue at the time of the August 1 fork." (3)

The article w/that nugget goes on to state that when Ethereum split "Coinbase
eventually let customers withdraw their share of the new currency, known as
"Ethereum Classic," even though it still does not allow it to be bought and
sold on the Coinbase site."

Seems like a risky bet not to just say something closer to "Hey if Bitcoin
Cash is a thing and worth more than 1% of the original BTC we'll support it.
If it's not at the end of 90 days we'll give you a way to take it out either
way."

Judging by the volume of concern and disdain from newbies in the Bitcoin
forums a lot of people got woken up by this event and what it means to have
your decentralized currency controlled by a central authority.

(1) [https://blog.coinbase.com/update-for-customers-with-
bitcoin-...](https://blog.coinbase.com/update-for-customers-with-bitcoin-
stored-on-coinbase-99e2d4790a53?gi=5c5ca3523686)

(2) [http://bitcoinist.com/mass-exodus-from-coinbase-
spawns-12hou...](http://bitcoinist.com/mass-exodus-from-coinbase-
spawns-12hour-bitcoin-withdrawal-delays/)

(3) [http://fortune.com/2017/07/31/bitcoin-fork-
coinbase/](http://fortune.com/2017/07/31/bitcoin-fork-coinbase/)

~~~
barmstrong
Coinbase CEO here - apologies for the confusion on that.

I certainly wouldn't say we are treating it as a "shitcoin". I tweeted out a
few thoughts here to share how I think about it:

[https://twitter.com/brian_armstrong/status/89248668753155686...](https://twitter.com/brian_armstrong/status/892486687531556865)

Hope it helps. Thx!

~~~
rmaus
This is completely off topic, but does it bother anybody else that we live in
a world where the CEO of any technologically savvy company disseminates
announcements as a picture of text?

~~~
rcthompson
Well, that's kind of the _de facto_ standard for tweeting large blocks of text
that don't read well as a sequence of tweets.

~~~
mmagin
I think the idea was more along the lines of "Remember blog posts?"

------
fpgaminer
Something very important that I don't see advertised, with regard to BCH. The
primary client, BitcoinABC, completely changed consensus rules a mere 5 days
before the hardfork:

[https://github.com/Bitcoin-ABC/bitcoin-
abc/blob/174846aaaf56...](https://github.com/Bitcoin-ABC/bitcoin-
abc/blob/174846aaaf564e64b6bd06d679996b52ba86ad53/doc/release-notes/release-
notes-0.14.5.md)

The important bit:

> Enforce strong replay protection (require SIGHASH_FORKID and
> SCRIPT_VERIFY_STRICTENC compliance)

That completely changes the consensus rules of BCH. Again, 5 days before a
hardfork. 5 days.

I just ... I can't wrap my brain around why _anyone_ in their right mind would
think that BCH should be worth anything, if this is the acumen of the
development team.

Why would any exchange trust the code? Why would users trust the code?

If BCH is any kind of experiment, it's not an experiment of big-block vs small
block (Bitcoin has had bigger block functionality for over 6 months now). It's
an experiment to see if cowboy programmers can patch a live $40 billion
network willy nilly and convince everyone that that's okay.

~~~
mchristen
If anything the fact that things are working as intended(so far) proves that
such a change is not nearly as dangerous as BCC developers make it out to be.

If you don't trust the code powering BCH then you can simply ignore all your
coins on BCH and pretend they don't exist, you're in the exact same situation
as you were yesterday.

The fear mongering of 'all hard forks are dangerous' is just that, fear
mongering, and has no basis in actual reality.

~~~
Misker
I agree with the fearmongering bit, but ignoring BCH is a little more
difficult. BCH just caused a pretty decent dip in the price of BTC, and will
likely make it drop further.

Unless it crashes and burns, in which case faith in Core will be even
stronger.

~~~
zeusk
5% at Bitcoin's level of volatility is not a dip.

------
brndnmtthws
To me, it seems like Bitcoin Cash (BCH) is just a cash grab (no pun intended)
by a minority of misguided Bitcoin enthusiasts. From what I can tell, the main
reason for the resistance to Segwit is that it reduces the power and influence
of miners. That's why the people who are pushing BCH are also invested in
mining. Miners earn money from transaction fees, and therefore have an
incentive to artificially inflate the fees by delaying transactions
(transactions are processed in order of highest to lowest fees).

There's a great blog post which summarizes the situation here:
[https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-heck-bitcoin-might-
split-...](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-heck-bitcoin-might-split-two-
august-1-mohit-mamoria)

~~~
andrewla
It really takes some twisted logic to paint BCH has a miner-friendly measure.
It is unfriendly to miners in every way that matters, which is why miners have
never achieved consensus on any of the large-block proposals so far.

Specifically, it:

\- reduces the need for fees on transactions, as block space is no longer a
sufficiently scarce resources

\- makes orphaned blocks more likely, which means that the probability of
losing a block that you already successfully mined is increased.

Although I'm a large-blocker myself, Segwit has one thing going for it,
namely, fixing transaction malleability. For anyone who has to deal with
bitcoin in bulk (any business using bitcoin, basically), malleability is a
killer bug -- it makes it very hard to detect if your transactions have made
it on to the network, and impossible to chain transactions together reliably.
That's who benefits from Segwit, and it's a big benefit.

It also enables some off-chain solutions that are infeasible in a malleable-
prone network.

The opposition to Segwit, in my opinion, stems mainly from the fact that it is
complicated, and was given priority over the "clear and present" problem of
blocks being full that had a simpler solution of hard-forking to increase
block size. So it's being held up as a totem by the large-blocking crowd of
the poor decisions of Core, and for alleged conflicts of interest around the
off-chain solutions.

Other than the risk of a hard fork itself, the negative effects of a block
size increase are so small as to be meaningless, for users and for miners.

~~~
flashdance
> makes orphaned blocks more likely, which means that the probability of
> losing a block that you already successfully mined is increased

A higher orphan rate won't reduce miner profitability. Since everyone would
experience the orphaning, the difficulty will stabilize at a lower level and
profitability should be the same.

~~~
RustyRussell
No, you don't have an orphaning problem on _your own_ blocks, so it drives
centralization.

This is _exactly_ what happened when blocksize jumped from 100k to 250k: every
small miner jumped to the largest pool (ghash.io) because they were seeing
increased orphan rates, driving that pool over 50% of hashing power.

~~~
mikekchar
I don't actually see why that would happen. The chance of a block being an
orphan is dependent upon the number of competing miners solving the block at
the same time. Why would block size impact that at all?

Larger block size increases computation necessary to solve the block, so it is
equivalent to increasing the difficulty. Another factor is that you might
decide to wait longer to get more transactions in the block. This reduces your
chance of solving the block, but increases your payback. I can't see how it
could possibly increase the orphan rate because it _increases_ the possible
spread for solution time (some people will wait, while other won't). In other
words, it should _decrease_ the orphan rate.

I suppose block size increases the network latency for advertising solved
blocks... but going from 100k to 250k every 10 minutes does not strike me as
being particularly problematic.

Also, I'm trying to verify your claim and I can't see any evidence of it. It
appears that different clients were using different block sizes for a long
time. The maximum block size on the BTC network has been over 250K since 2013,
according to [0]. Also take a look of this graph of orphaned blocks [1]. It
seems to be highly variable between 2014 and 1016, but then lower since then.
I see no evidence of a sudden increase in orphans. Clearly, having most of the
hashing power in one miner will reduce orphans, but I just don't see a
connection at all with blocksize.

So what am I missing?

[0] - [http://hashingit.com/analysis/39-the-myth-of-the-megabyte-
bi...](http://hashingit.com/analysis/39-the-myth-of-the-megabyte-bitcoin-
block) [1] - [https://blockchain.info/charts/n-orphaned-
blocks?timespan=al...](https://blockchain.info/charts/n-orphaned-
blocks?timespan=all&daysAverageString=7)

~~~
RustyRussell
> Larger block size increases computation necessary to solve the block

No, they're merkled, so it doesn't.

> I suppose block size increases the network latency for advertising solved
> blocks... but going from 100k to 250k every 10 minutes does not strike me as
> being particularly problematic.

Doesn't matter how often it is, I find a block, I mine the child immediately.
You have to wait until you've received and validated the block. It's all about
latency.

> Also, I'm trying to verify your claim and I can't see any evidence of it. It
> appears that different clients were using different block sizes for a long
> time. The maximum block size on the BTC network has been over 250K since
> 2013, according to [0]. Also take a look of this graph of orphaned blocks
> [1]

Yep, this is now ancient history. Mean blocksizes tend to mask what's really
happening, but I recall the orphaning problem and ghash.io spike personally.

And blockchain.info's orphan block measurements are completely unreliable :(

More background:
[https://rusty.ozlabs.org/?p=535](https://rusty.ozlabs.org/?p=535) (my blog)

~~~
mikekchar
Thanks for the reply. I have to say that I still can't quite understand how
block sizes affect orphaning, but I'll have to think about it.

------
JohnJamesRambo
It has a lot more hashrate than I expected, I've been pretty surprised. Last
number I saw was 3.9% and 247 petahash/s and climbing. I hope it can survive,
I actually prefer it to the segwit Bitcoin plan and it seems to follow the
original Satoshi plan.

~~~
xorcist
There are some key words that are copy pasted into every conversation of
Bitcoin lately. "Satoshi's plan" is one of them. Make of that what you will.
Personally I find it a tad bit creepy. Bitcoin is innovative, but it attracts
penny stock-like investment schemes like sugar to ants.

Of all the sales pitches for this coin, Satoshi's original plan makes the
least possible sense. This is a fork from Satoshi's coin that _removes_
features, the most important of which is the enabler of payment channels,
which if anything _was_ Satoshi's plan.

It's not like it's hard to read Satoshi's writings directly from the source.
It's seven years ago, not ancient Rome. The forum has almost all of it intact
verbatim and then there's the wiki. In what little sense there ever was a
"plan" it's in plain view for everyone to see and read all about what people
thought of payment channels, fraud proofs, and everything else.

~~~
sboselli
What??

I'm not for or against either side, but what you just said is just plain wrong
and it looks as if you are the one who has not read either the paper or the
forum post. He did not mention payment chains either in the paper or the old
original post about block size.

~~~
kobeya
The very first version of bitcoin had payment channels in the code. That's
what sequence numbers are for. That's why there are sighash flags and weird
rules for blanking sequence numbers. That's why the first version of bitcoin
had transaction replacement.

It just happens to also be the case that the design Satoshi had for payment
channels at that time was horribly broken and left nodes open to DoS attacks.
So it was removed by other developers and slowly over time safe versions of
the features were added again in the form of BIP68 (sequence number
transaction replacement) and BIP141 (segwit).

~~~
Jabanga
It did not have payment channel code. There is nothing to indicate that the
nLockTime field was originally intended for use in payment channels. There is
no source for when the conversation between Satoshi and the developer, in
which Satoshi describes payment channel functionality, took place.

And large blocks were very much part of Bitcoin's original plan. They were
described even before the initial release of the software:

[http://www.mail-
archive.com/cryptography@metzdowd.com/msg099...](http://www.mail-
archive.com/cryptography@metzdowd.com/msg09964.html)

~~~
kobeya
Ok, well I HAVE the early code and it very much does have transaction
replacement code using the sequence field.

~~~
keymone
is this the original code -
[https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/commit/4405b78d6059e536c3...](https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/commit/4405b78d6059e536c36974088a8ed4d9f0f29898)
? or can you point to earlier version?

------
Animats
That gets the chain un-stuck. The difficulty starts off with the old, huge
value. The next difficulty adjustment will be at ceil(478560 / 2016), correct?
That's 1248 blocks ahead. Check me on this, please.

If mining of that chain is very low, it will take a long time before the
difficulty adjusts downward. So far 6 blocks have been mined on that chain.[1]
Rate is maybe one per hour, instead of the usual one every 10 minutes. That
puts the difficulty adjustment maybe six weeks out. We'll have to see who
mines on that chain. The hash rate may go up or down, depending on what the
big miners do. Mining will be unprofitable until the next difficulty
adjustment, because the price of the coin is lower than the "mainstream" coin.
Confirmations will be really slow. After the next adjustment, the chain will
work better.

Something similar happened to some altcoins. Some big miner mined for a while,
made some money, ran up the difficulty adjustment way up, and then stopped.
Block generation then stalled. This thing self-adjusts, but adjusts to big
changes in hash rate very slowly.

[1] [http://blockdozer.com/insight/](http://blockdozer.com/insight/)

~~~
cesarb
IIRC, this particular hardfork has a change to allow for fast downward
adjustments of its difficulty after just a few blocks, in case too few blocks
were found in the last 12 hours. It should already have enough blocks for this
special code to get triggered.

~~~
Animats
Here's the code change.[1] "Triggering it require to lose 92% of the hashrate
abruptly." That's protection against a total stall. It looks like hash rate is
down, but not by that much. It may still take a while to get to the next
difficulty adjustment. It's up to the big miners.

[1] [https://reviews.bitcoinabc.org/D298](https://reviews.bitcoinabc.org/D298)

~~~
Animats
The emergency difficulty adjustment finally tripped, and block times are now
around 25 minutes.[1] 40 blocks mined so far, 1208 to the next difficulty
adjustment. So about 3 weeks to go until the next regular difficulty
adjustment, which should bring block times down to the usual 10 minutes.

After that, BCC should function normally. The financial end is a separate
issue; that won't be clear until BCC markets are fully functional.

[1] [https://medium.com/@SimpleCrypto/bitcoin-cash-difficulty-
adj...](https://medium.com/@SimpleCrypto/bitcoin-cash-difficulty-adjustment-
results-in-25min-blocks-48cbc1ac004e)

------
TekMol
1.9 MByte in size / 6985 transactions.

This is about twice as much as is possible in a block of the old Bitcoin
chain.

This will become super interesting.

~~~
hendzen
Yeah, if the fees are lower and the network is less congested I wonder if
legacy Bitcoin could get overtaken for small transactions?

~~~
TekMol
If so, that would be a historic victory of pragmatism.

A lot of popular engineers in powerful positions have been working for years
on how to scale Bitcoin.

Now some people said "Fuck that! We will just increase this integer from 1 to
8".

Reminds me of how Linus Torvalds created a simple monolithic Kernel while
GNU&Co were working on sophisticated microkernels. Now, 26 years later,
everything from servers to smartphones runs on Linux. And GNU Herd is still
considered experimental.

~~~
justadeveloper2
Except nobody was "investing" (speculating) on GNU Herd. It should give a lot
of people pause that Bitcoin can just suddenly split like this. What's to stop
it from being split again and again?

~~~
opportune
The split itself is not damaging. It's like if 100 bars of your gold were
suddenly 100 bars of gold and 100 bars of gold cash. The original gold
marketplace is only affected as much as it is _replaced_ by the gold cash
marketplace. So it doesn't matter how many times the coin gets split in this
fashion

~~~
johannes1234321
While This analgy works only to some limited degree - gold has a value in
itself, you can use it to build some jewels, an electric conductor or a door
stopper among other things. A Bitcoin has no inherent value. If nobody is
interested in Bitcoin (or Bitcoin cash) anymore it's just a few bits in a disk
which can be overwritten.

------
bsmith
Now 4 blocks in:
[https://cash.coin.dance/blocks#blockDetails](https://cash.coin.dance/blocks#blockDetails)

~~~
tlrobinson
Wasn't the fork scheduled to happen ~7 hours ago? Why did the first block take
so long if the hashrate is high enough to produce 4 blocks in the subsequent
half hour?

~~~
zorked
The new chain inherited the difficulty from the previous chain. Now that the
network realized there isn't as much hash rate the difficulty has been reduced
and a more normal rate of block creation restored.

Edit: that didn't happen yet, I stand corrected

~~~
LyndsySimon
My understanding is that it will take much longer than that for the BCC chain
difficulty to significantly adjust.

~~~
eco
2016 blocks from what I understand. That's 14 days at 10 minute blocktimes.

------
sixdimensional
As someone who missed the Bitcoin boat, I admit to having to read up to figure
out what was going on here.

From what I read, Bitcoin Cash is an alternative cryptocurrency like Ethereum,
but based on a change to the original design of Bitcoin algorithms, which
increased the basic block size of the transactions. It seems this was done to
increase transaction performance.

Also it seems there were competing proposals in the community about how to
accomplish the goal of increasing transaction performance, "SegWit2x" and
"BitCoin Cash" \- and the folks who started the BitCoin Cash fork didn't agree
with the SegWit2x strategy.

Anybody else more in the know, can explain it like I'm 5?

Is this a good thing or a bad thing? Are people exploiting this via some sort
of arbitrage or whatever to try to make money again? It seems risky?

EDIT: Removed quotes around the word "fork".

~~~
Taek
> From what I read, Bitcoin Cash is an alternative cryptocurrency like
> Ethereum, but based on a change to the original design of Bitcoin
> algorithms, which increased the basic block size of the transactions. It
> seems this was done to increase transaction performance.

It is an altcoin, but unlike most altcoins it has a shared history with
Bitcoin. Basically, at the moment of it's creation (today, August 1st),
everone who owned bitcoins owned an equal number of Bitcoin Cash. So now they
are two separate coins and two separate chains, but with a shared history.

> Is this a good thing or a bad thing?

It's hard to give a judgement. When Apple started working on a self-driving
car, was that a good thing or a bad thing? Hard to say, it more of just was a
thing to know, unless you had a horse in the self-driving car race. Bitcoin
Cash will either be successful in some capacity or it will flop altogether,
but the original Bitcoin certainly isn't going anywhere.

If you don't have a horse in the race, I wouldn't think of it as a good or bad
thing. It's just an event that doesn't mean too much unless you are excited
about Bitcoin Cash and the principles it stands for, or if you have Bitcoin
and don't realize that you also have an equivalent number of Bitcoin Cash
(currently trading at like $200 each - a nontrivial sum!)

~~~
sixdimensional
Is this kind of like having a new denomination of currency? For example, why
carry around 10 $1 bills when I can carry around one $10 bill?

If the number of bitcoins you have stays the same, but just the block size of
storage in transaction changes, then I'd guess it's very similar to a bigger
unit of currency.

~~~
Taek
No, not quite. It's like having $25 in your wallet in USD, and then next time
you look at your wallet you have $25 in USD and also $25 in USD-different.
Then you go to the store and find out they only accept USD, and not USD-
different, but if you go to a currency exchange you can trade your USD-
different for $1 or $2 in USD each.

Not a great analogy I guess, but the point is that it's definitely not the
same as having a new denomination of currency. It's a whole new currency
entirely, it's just that everyone who had Bitcoin was "granted" (sorta) this
new currency too, in the same volume that they had the old currency.

~~~
sixdimensional
I understand - thank you for sharing!

I find it interesting that the two split and then essentially float as
different currencies at different rates. Surely, there will be some inter-
relationship between them as well.

------
jahbrewski
Can someone provide a summary explaining the significance of this event?

~~~
abritinthebay
Outside the bitcoin community? Not much.

Inside? First salvo in a massive political civil war between interests with
different goals. There's this Bitcoin Cash implementation vs Segwit.

~~~
Taek
The first salvo was called Bitcoin XT. And the second was called Bitcoin
Classic. And the third was called Bitcoin Unlimited.

And really, there were lots of skirmishes before any of that even. This is a
long, old battle, and the fork is more like a resolution (two sides peacefully
going their separate ways) than a continuation of the war.

~~~
antocv
Can you mention some of the salvos fired by your side?

~~~
kobeya
Such as? If there are any complaints against Bitcoin Core it is that they have
been ignoring this issue, not fighting battles.

~~~
antocv
Gavin, a bitcoin developer, Satoshi Nakamoto himself gave commit access rights
to Gavin.

They have not been ignoring this issue, they have been firing salvos and
censorship left and right. Fighting the original bitcoin with all they had.

~~~
kobeya
Gavin setup the github repo. So I guess he granted himself commit rights? But
in any case I'm not sure what you're trying to say.

------
mathieutd
Interesting to see that the backlog in unprocessed transactions on the
original bitcoin chain is exploding at the same time: [https://jochen-
hoenicke.de/queue/#24h](https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#24h)

~~~
TD-Linux
I suspect that many people are sending their balances to a new address, so
that they can import their old keys into a Bitcoin Cash client.

~~~
BenoitP
The fees are very low, and all the same sizes.

My take on this is this is partisans of big blocks saturating the original
chain; as if to try to prove a point. It does cost them some little amount of
money, though.

------
xbeta
ELI5: For folks who moved BTC out of Coinbase before the hard-fork, what's the
next step? Said I want to keep both BTC and BCC. I had a hardware wallet, what
are some implications that I move my BTC now to my hardware wallet?

~~~
landhar
I had the same question earlier, and I found the following statement by the
maintainers of the Electrum wallet very englightning:

[https://electrum.org/bcc.txt](https://electrum.org/bcc.txt)

In particular this section:

> How to redeem my BCC?

> BCC wallets will require you to import your seed or your private keys, which
> can be exported from Electrum. Doing so will expose all your Bitcoin funds
> associated with that seed to the BCC wallet you decide to use.

> Therefore, _after_ the BCC fork, but _before_ you enter a seed or private
> key in a BCC wallet, you should move all your funds to a new Electrum
> wallet, with a new seed. You will still be able to use the old seed or
> private key with BCC, because BCC has replay protection. Wait until your
> funds are confirmed in your new Bitcoin wallet, before you enter the old
> private key in a BCC wallet. This will protect your BTC funds from
> rogue/untrusted software.

~~~
xbeta
Great find! I guess I will have to wait for that Electrum wallet which
supports BCC then, then transfer?

------
jnordwick
Not surprisingly, when BCH started, it ran up about $150 and at the same time,
BCT fell by a similar amount (approx $2800 to $2650). And as BCH slowly falls,
BCT is slowly climbing. Which makes sense if you view this as an equity spin-
off.

I would expect this relationship to hold -- that for every dollar BCH gains,
BCT is prevented from gaining a dollar. Unless somebody has some good reason
this wouldn't be the case.

At the same time ETH ran up from about $205 to $225.

~~~
sobani
For posterity it's notable that at this moment BTC is at $2694.88, while BCH
is at $691.94.

Following your assumption that means that the split increased the total value
by about $600!

Make of that what you will. :)

~~~
jnordwick
Where did you get that price from because i dont see that BCH has been
anywhere close to that since yesterday.

~~~
sobani
[https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin-
cash](https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin-cash)

I did happen to write my comment around the top of the price chart, as the
current price is $447.

------
xbeta
Quick Question: Sorry, don't know much about Bitcoin, but does this mean Block
#478559 is the last block that was forked? Or the first block that was forked?

~~~
redog
478558 is the last common block 478559 is the forked one.

------
provost
Interesting -- It still shows "NO UNPLANNED CHAIN SPLIT DETECTED" on
[https://www.btcforkmonitor.info](https://www.btcforkmonitor.info), which a
lot of folks are using to monitor the fork (from the other HN thread).

~~~
rory096
Well it's not unplanned.... Note how the Bitcoin Cash box is a different color
and says "This node's scheduled chain split has occurred."

------
whytaka
Does this mean Coinbase wallet holders have officially missed out on the fork?

~~~
bpicolo
It means that Coinbase is currently sitting on a bunch of bitcoin cash that
they don't currently publicly plan to distribute (Though if they do add
support for cash, they will distribute it, apparently)

~~~
jnordwick
This is seems susceptible to a lawsuit. It would be the equivalent of a stock
M/A or spin-off and your broker refusing to give you any stock issuance you
were to receive.

~~~
NedIsakoff
Or is it something like this: SingerSoft has decided to give 1 share of
SingerSoft owner of each share of Microsoft. Unfortunately you're broker isn't
going to add it to your account for you.

------
burger_moon
Are there any reputable exchanges which you can buy bitcoin cash from yet?

~~~
TaylorGood
Bittrex and others

~~~
ruleabidinguser
Bittrex is telling me I can't... what others?

~~~
doctoboggan
You can get them on Kraken

------
agorabinary
Despite having a higher hashrate than expected, the price of BCC is crashing
towards 1/10 of a bitcoin. The network effects and name recognition of Bitcoin
are too strong.

~~~
andrewla
More markets are opening; bittrex [1] just opened and the price is now moving
upwards pretty steadily (they opened at ~0.079 BCH/BTC and are now over 0.12),
with good volume, 780 BTC ~= $2.1M so far

[https://bittrex.com/Market/Index?MarketName=BTC-
BCC](https://bittrex.com/Market/Index?MarketName=BTC-BCC)

~~~
makomk
The bittrex price appears to have diverged quite sharply from, for example,
the ViaBTC price[1]. At the time of posting this ViaBTC is 0.127 BCH/BTC and
bittrex 0.194 BCH/BTC. I think this may be because ViaBTC is accepting BCH
deposits and bittrex isn't.

[1]
[https://www.viabtc.com/quot/realtime?currency=btc&dest=bcc&c...](https://www.viabtc.com/quot/realtime?currency=btc&dest=bcc&chart=simple)

------
jamiegreen
Forgive the naive question, but how does the whole 'free Bitcoin Cash' thing
work? I have a small amount of Bitcoin in the Exodus wallet.

~~~
pkilgore
Think of it like copying twitter's database then launching a competitor. All
tweets, users, etc. on both sites are the same up until the day the database
is copied. Then the tweets, users etc. can be different depending on which
site folks use.

You get all your tweets on the new site for free.

Same with BCC. They copied the Bitcoin database at block 478558. So if you
have a coin in a BTC account before block 478558, you now have the same coin
on the BTC chain, and a copy of that coin on the copied BCC chain.

To use it, you just need to use a BCC wallet, the same way you'd use a BTC
wallet to use BTC.

But if you don't know your private key (usually because your coin was on an
exchange) then you are out of luck. Google if your exchange will credit you
BCC.

~~~
tylersmith
I've tried explaining this to numerous people but never thought about
comparing it to starting a clone of a website with the same DB to start with.
Great analogy.

------
techaddict009
Finally BTC has been hard forked and BCH & BTC are live.

Some fun facts: Forked should have name XBC as per ISO bt thats already taken
so they named BCH

1st BCH block 478559 & BTC Block no 478559 where mined by ViaBTC

ViaBTC dedicated BCH block to her daughter by adding comment on 1st Block of
BCH "�_M�*/ViaBTC/Welcome to the world, Shuya Yang!/�q���3�0c"

~~~
dingo_bat
And it was rejected, wasn't it?

------
konschubert
Is it possible that all these forks will eventually just become alternative
cryptocurrencies just like Etherum or Litecoin?

People will use whatever fits their use case and there will be well-oiled
exchanges arbitraging the valuations.

I'm probably neglecting some of the short term effects of a splitting chain
here.

------
dorianm
Also [https://pointsproject.org](https://pointsproject.org) for those
interested in new curriencies

------
hughw
Does this take the pressure off the planned hard fork for Segwit2x? Big
blockers now have what they wanted. Seems like BTC could now be the small-
block paradise Core wants.

------
mrfusion
I'm confused by all this. What happens if you have a small paper wallet from a
few years ago? That means you also have bitcoin cash now?

~~~
hossbeast
Yes

------
aphextron
tl;dr what does this mean?

~~~
antocv
There is 2 bitcoins now. Bitcoin Core with feature of segregated witness
(segwit).

And Bitcoin Cash with increased block size limit.

------
vedoza
now bitcoin cash
[https://www.exchangeratesdata.com/convert/BCH/USD/](https://www.exchangeratesdata.com/convert/BCH/USD/)

------
mikeschmatz
So, if you held 100 BTC before the fork, now you get to have 100BTC + 100BCC?
Nice! Can we fork it few more times please? Me likes free money :-)

------
ringaroundthetx
with an ounce of confidence, maybe people will be too greedy to sell it off.

------
solotronics
the tyranny of the miners.

