Bitcoin forks and airdrops
btcdiv.com
btcdiv.com
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.
The value bitcoin has is in it's trust. The miners do not give it that trust in total, only in part.
Of course that could happen, but it would require basically everyone to agree that Y is X and to switch over to Y, which is basically an impossible task, let alone when tens or hundreds of billions of dollars are involved.
It's a criticism that can be applied to literally anything.
https://gyrovague.com/2017/08/09/the-rich-get-richer-loonie-...
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.
To spend, create the transaction offline on a bitcoinabc wallet. Broadcast it from a connected computer later.
At that point you can then simply choose between BTC/BCH/BTG wallets with effectively zero risk - no need to perform wallet surgery yourself.
Your method is correct, transfer your btc off of that wallet first and then go around claiming your forked balances
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.
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.
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
It is indeed the limiting factor for any public blockchain based system. The rest of your comment describes capacity however, which is something else. We can increase capacity without increasing scalability.
> Miners are very incentivized to fix it,
This is false. Miners are the ones who stand to gain from high fees. And before you say more capacity would lead to more transactions and higher fees, run the numbers. Compare with less developed chains. It is quite clear that there is a cliff beyond which fees per block quickly fall off.
There is more to this power conflict than two sides. Explanations that are trivial and wrong will not help us govern this system towards the future.
> (I still don't exactly get what segwit does)
It removes the hard block cap and replaces it with a flexbile limit. Inputs counts as one fourth the size of outputs, so the more inputs a block have the bigger it is allowed to get. This factor was chosen because it could be fit in the same backwards compatible transaction style that was utilized to deploy P2SH, where non-compilant nodes only see anyone-can-spend transactions.
The reason inputs were made to be cheaper than outputs was to disincentivize UXTO fragmentation. This is an increasingly serious problem which will soon rival the capacity problem. It was recently shown that a large Bitcoin exchange have completely unnecessarily fragmented millions of dollars worth into non-movable dust, since there have been no financial incentive to avoid it in the past.
Finally, since the new style transactions breaks compatibility anyway, the opportunity was taken to change the format into one that is not malleable, and avoids the worst case verification times of the old format. The latter is a true scability improvement. One limiting factor for the number of transactions in a block is the latency from verifying the signatures, and it would not be good for the network if people started cheating even more on this.
Bitcoin Core developers did not ask for that. By the way, Segwit2x was entirely unrelated to segwit. The name was adversarially chosen to cause maximum confusion like this.
> But when came the time to implement the second part of the deal (segwit2x), core devs decided it was not needed anymore
Segwit2x wasn't a "deal" that Bitcoin Core developers entered into. Segwit2x was a proposal that was strongly rejected by the community.
This is not true at all. Miners are much better off under bitcoin's crazy fee market (in the short-term at least). No other cryptocurrency is generating anywhere near as much value from transactions as bitcoin
The core devs are not committed to minimal changes to the original design, but they are committed to decentralization.
> 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_...
I'm pretty sure I read about it like it was a consensus, but I can't find it again. Or maybe I just didn't understand it at the time.
So if trust is broken, it's only between members of that group, and it does not involve devs. Sorry, I can't edit my initial comment anymore (plus, replies would not make sense anymore if I edited it).
I would love to know that as well, I never bought in any fork myself.
Although, the very first time I bought some cryptocurrency, it was dogecoin, soon after its release. I bought for an insignificant amount and considered it lost right away, just like when I buy a pizza or icecream. It was "just in case" (and it turned out to be my first profit, feeling good, albeit just winning a few bucks). Maybe some people are specializing in that?
Would love to hear from anyone buying in those forks.
The following is my speculation only and not based in any real world data: Many people have found themselves on the winning side of a high risk bet and their Bitcoins are suddenly very valuable. Some of them look to put a part of their winnings in some equally unlikely bet, and it seems like any unlikely bet will do. When enough people do this it becomes self perpetuating.
Sounds like it can go on forever. But the reality is that forever it is most certainly not.
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?
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?
If you had your BTC in a hardware wallet like Trezor during the split, claiming BCH and BTG was automatic with firmware upgrades which only came with considerable delay. Claiming lessor and unsupported forks off a hardware wallet seems like a major chore and security risk since you’d need to regenerate your private keys off-device.
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.