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Comment by zone411 | Hacker News Reader

An even better analogy would be a company splitting itself into parts. Gap will do it in 2020 for example.

Maybe, but when Gap splits up some assets go to one, some assets go to the other. When a coin forks, someone just hits copy-paste and lists it on an exchange. No assets are transferred, no value changes hands, because there's no intrinsic value to a crypto asset. A gap split-up yields no intrinsic change in value, just like if I take $100 and put it into 2 piles.

This is more akin to my forking the GitHub repo for MySQL and calling it MySQLCash (MCH, naturally). It doesn't change anything about the original; that only happens if the new asset wages an adoption campaign like BCH/BSV/Bwhatever, in which case the origin story is irrelevant.

Ah, yes, this is good nuance, but I would like to argue that there are intangibles that can be replicated across Gap's future spinouts. There will be aspects of the culture, certain processes, relationships, and perhaps even software, that will be instantly DUPLICATED the moment the company splits!

And remember, the value of a chain is not simply its code. In fact, you can argue that the code is NOT important AT ALL to the value of a chain, for the very reason that it is entirely open. The chain's valuation comes from the network - and arguably the most important of those (at least in the short term) - the users who transact on the chain, and the miners whose hash power push the chain forward, will splinter.

When a chain splits, the miners must make a decision on what percentage of their finite hash power should be allocated to each fork.

I'm actually of the belief that this analogy is VERY good.

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