
Bitcoin forks and airdrops - naveen99
https://btcdiv.com
======
empath75
But cryptocurrency is a rare commodity right?

How many bitcoin forks before people stop believing the bullshit that these
tokens are deflationary.

Bitcoins are rare as long as people keep up the delusion that there is only
one blockchain that matters, but there’s really nothing that distinguishes the
consensus coin from the others aside from how much mining power it has
currently.

All the miners or merchants could switch to one or several of these forks at
the drop of a hat and the value of ‘core’ bitcoin will go to nothing.

~~~
shanusmagnus
Great point. Which raises the question: with billions of dollars on the line,
why haven't all the miners switched at the drop of a hat to something more
beneficial to them?

~~~
KidComputer
Miners are making a killing off of the insanely high Bitcoin transaction fees.

~~~
zeep
Are the miners paying the developers so that they don't implement a solution?

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jpatokal
Some time ago, I wrote a little parable about airdrops and how bizarre they
are in real world terms:

[https://gyrovague.com/2017/08/09/the-rich-get-richer-
loonie-...](https://gyrovague.com/2017/08/09/the-rich-get-richer-loonie-swaps-
and-altcoin-airdrops/)

~~~
kazanz
This parable ignores the fact that other individuals want to own alternative
currencies.

If Rolex company manufactures a new collectable Rolex and gives it away to
someone who already owns another collectable watch, this does not mean that
both watches now have half the value of the original.

Furthermore, if I produce 1000 knockoffs of the original luxury watch and give
it away to the Rolex owner, it does not reduce the value of the luxury watch
either.

In fact, the value of the 1000 knockoffs plus the luxury watch is higher than
the value of just the luxury watch alone.

There is still a scarcity of luxury watches, as well as demand for ownership
of both the luxury item and the knockoffs.

As long as more individuals wish to purchase said commodities with fiat the
commodities have value, regardless of if they are given away or not.

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v768
United Bitcoin seems to be a scam:
[https://np.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/7j21nw/anoth...](https://np.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/7j21nw/another_bitcoin_fork_in_15_hours_give_me_a_break/dr3mh23/)

~~~
makomk
United Bitcoin also seemed like an overly-elaborate attempt to encourage
people to spam the Bitcoin chain (which has been running close to capacity)
with junk transactions by promising them tokens if they did.

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djaychela
Sorry for the foolish question, but does anyone know a way of claiming Bitcoin
Cash without revealing your private key? Or do I need to transfer my entire
balance from the (pre-fork) address to avoid any potential issues, and then
use the private key from that address to prove my claim? I've done some
reading this morning about it, and can't find any options which don't involve
giving up private keys - which I am not doing without having transferred my
balance out already. I only hold 10.5 BTC (across several addresses), so I
know it's not a fortune to most people, but it is to me!

~~~
xenos02
Revealing your private key to some form of software or online service is
necessary in order to _send_ it

Your method is correct, transfer your btc off of that wallet first and then go
around claiming your forked balances

~~~
djaychela
Thanks - just wanted to check before getting into all that!

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vog
Be careful not to make your "claim" on an altcoin that has a very low value
compared to Bitcoin.

Why? Well, to be safe, you need at least on Bitcoin transaction [1]. But that
means you'll receive a loss if those transaction fees are larger than the
exchange value you get from trading the altcoin back to Bitcoin.

[1] This is to avoid exposing a still-valuable (within Bitcoin) secret key to
an unknown altcoin client.

~~~
illumin8
Couldn't you just make a single transaction with all of your BTC you currently
hold (provided you've held it in the same wallet for recent history, when all
these forks have occurred), then cash out all of your forks/airdrops using the
old secret key?

You still run a small risk that a shady fork/airdrop could try to use your
secret key to transfer other forks/airdrops, but you would avoid the risk to
your BTC holdings.

~~~
vog
Given the current Bitcoin exchange rates and transaction fees, this "single
transaction" could still be more expensive than the value you get out from all
altcoins combined. It depends on how much Bitcoin you have, though.

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nerdponx
Forgive my ignorance, but who are all these people setting up these forks, and
who is actually buying the forked currency? It makes no sense to me.

~~~
oelmekki
This is the result of conflicts between bitcoin actors, mainly miners and core
devs. We'll probably see more of those, btw, as those conflicts are far from
resolved.

The core problem is scalability. Miners are very incentivized to fix it,
because they get fees on transactions (so, the more transactions the better).
Core dev, on their part, want to keep the closest possible to original design
(any change can have dramatic consequences).

In 2016, scalability issues started to become really serious, and miners asked
to increase block size (that is, to allow to add more transactions in a single
block, so that transactions wait for less time before being validated). In
return, core dev proposed segwit as a solution for scalability problems (I
still don't exactly get what segwit does). Miners still wanted to go with
block increase, so it was a stall (and scalability problems got worse). A few
forks tried to take matters on their hand to fix that problem (although, more
like competitive softwares, since they did not use the same blockchain
history, they started new blockchains at block 0).

In 2017, everybody finally reached an agreement: blocks size will be increased
and segwit will be deployed, so both solutions would be implemented. But core
devs asked for it to be done in two steps: first segwit, then segwit2x (segwit
with double block size). Miners agreed and started to run their mining
software with segwit, effectively making it used by the network (Bitcoin cash
was born at that time, from miners who wanted block increased, but not
segwit). But when came the time to implement the second part of the deal
(segwit2x), core devs decided it was not needed anymore (and bitcoin gold was
created as a reaction).

I would take two things away, here:

1\. each time a decision need to be made, it generates a fork from people not
agreeing to the final decision

2\. the trust between miners and core devs is probably broken, there probably
will be more and more forks, and more stalling on main chain

This wikipedia article explains more thoroughly the scalability issues:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin_scalability_problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin_scalability_problem)

~~~
wyldfire
I downvoted you because even though you took the time to write a detailed
reply, you seem grossly misinformed. As others have indicated, increasing the
block size was not agreed to by the core devs. It would create even more
wasted space and thus further increase centralization.

The core devs are not committed to minimal changes to the original design, but
they are committed to decentralization.

~~~
kanzure
The problem with bitcoin is that things can get so confusing :-)

> As others have indicated, increasing the block size was not agreed to by the
> core devs

In fact, segwit is a capacity increase:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/6i5sx1/a_reminder_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/6i5sx1/a_reminder_why_segwit_is_an_actual_blocksize/)

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dmichulke
_About Bitcore BTX:_

This is not an airdrop or claim, you just need to keep your wallet and claim
your BTX once your wallet.dat with (keys to) bitcoins held on Nov 2 don't
contain any BTC anymore. Doesn't matter if you do it now or in 2 years though.
Is that correct?

 _About United Bitcoin:_

BTCDIV says: Must act before block 501878 (Jan 03, 2018).

UB.COM says: All users who transfer Bitcoins from his/her own address to
his/her own address between Block 494000 and Block 498777 (11 November 2017 to
12 December 2017 GMT) will be eligible [...]

So what's the date, Dec 12 or Jan 3?

 _About Bytether.com:_

A little bit complicated but as long as you had a BTC balance at the BCH fork,
you can claim whenever you want (and as long as the site and contract are
live).

Is that correct?

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naveen99
Atleast now people can stop lamenting how the best programmers are wasting
their time on ads and cat pictures. Even deep learning has some competition
from bitcoin for attention of hackers.

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Joeboy
So is anybody making anything that'd allow me to claim all this free stuff
automatically? I already did it for bcash but it took about a week to download
the forked blockchain, would presumably be longer now. Doing it for all these
things seems like a massive hassle. I'd be prepared to accept some risk and
pay some of my free imaginary internet money in return for this service.

~~~
drngdds
>I already did it for bcash but it took about a week to download the forked
blockchain

Explain? I just imported my private keys (for Bitcoins I got before the fork)
from Electrum to the Bitcoin Cash version of Electrum. Is there something else
I need to do or is that just if you're running a full node?

~~~
Joeboy
I'm running the code from the bitcoin cash github repo, which I guess means
I'm running a full node. Possibly I should be running Electrum or something
instead.

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naveen99
A sub to go along
[https://www.reddit.com/r/BitcoinAirdrops/](https://www.reddit.com/r/BitcoinAirdrops/)

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djaychela
Thanks to the OP - I have about 1.6BTC worth of other coins that I wasn't
aware of. Not sure why I hadn't looked into this, but thanks again.

~~~
naveen99
You are welcome. The information is surprisingly hard to find.

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JoshTriplett
Interesting idea, though it seems that it doesn't work particularly well for
coins held at exchanges like Coinbase.

~~~
techbubble
When you have coins at an exchange, all you really have is an IOU from the
exchange. This (and every other solution) for getting coins from forks
requires you to prove ownership of an address with a private key. This is by
design and is never intended to work with exchanges such as Coinbase.

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ars
So many warnings about importing bitcoin private keys into other software in
order to claim.

~~~
jpatokal
+1, there's really no good reason for insisting on a private key instead of
just a signed message.

If you do indulge, you'll want to move your BTC balance into another wallet,
making the old one (and its keys) worthless, before you do so.

Alternatively, if you're using a hardware wallet like the Ledger Nano, you can
do the split fairly painlessly locally for Bitcoin Cash & Gold. Byteball is
also straightforward to claim without sharing any private keys.

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wonderous
As strange as airdrops sound, they’re basically proof-of-ownership “likes”
that payout if that fork does well.

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xenos02
Thank you OP I just found $950 worth of alts I didn't know I had

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olegkikin
[deleted]

~~~
tehlike
so signing a message was not enough?

