We Survived Bitcoin Cash, Now Brace Yourselves For Bitcoin Gold - Another Bitcoin Fork, Coming October 25th
Seems like the old saying "divide et impera" is quite actual. For those not knowing what it means, well, "divide et impera" is a way of winning a battle "from the inside", by dividing a monolithic army into smaller factions that will eventually starting to fight with each other, instead of fighting together against a common enemy.
This seems to happen right now in the Bitcoin community. After Bitcoin Cash, we may witness another hard fork, this time for a currency called "Bitcoin Gold", here's the link to the official website.
As in the first fork, the initiative comes from a mining company, this time located in Hong Kong, called LightningASIC. The first hard fork, if you remember, was orchestrated by combo: mining company + exchange - Bitmain / ViaBTC. Both forks are, then, coming from China.
The value proposition of the new coin will be a new mining algorithm, namely Equihash (if I'm not mistaken, STEEM used to be mineable with this algorithm too, back when it was mineable). Equihash will replace SHA256, the de facto Bitcoin mining algorithm, and it will favor more mainstream mining gear (not only ASICs, that is). A bit strange, if you really think about it: a mining company producing Bitcoin mining equipment, launches a new coin which doesn't needs its equipment. Hmmmm... I wonder if they won't come up, in a few weeks, with a little gimmick in the algorithm that will be only be solvable with a hardware solution...
The way it looks right now, the so called "control" over Bitcoin will follow this route: mining gear producers will start forking the main chain, each one imposing their own hardware, thus trying to weaken the position of the standard currency.
It may or it may not work. But it will certainly create more drama and unnecessary bad PR.
That's why I'm usually interested in different governance systems (PoS/DPoS) than PoW. Proof of Work, as a governance mechanism, is inherently hackable. Maybe not by a direct 51% attack, but by small steps, leading to a much bigger "divide et impera" assault.
I'm a serial entrepreneur, blogger and ultrarunner. You can find me mainly on my blog at Dragos Roua where I write about productivity, business, relationships and running. Here on Steemit you may stay updated by following me @dragosroua.
https://steemit.com/~witnesses
If you're new to Steemit, you may find these articles relevant (that's also part of my witness activity to support new members of the platform):
This sounds like some kind of BS scam, I haven't seen any of the major players behind Segwit2x mention any of this.
I completely agree that PoS seems like a much better system. I hope that Ethereum is successful in switching over.
As for all these Bitcoin forks, I think it will end up better off for them. I think it's important for Bitcoin to "get it out of their system" earlier rather than later. If these forks end up being unsuccessful then it will stop happening going forward and force the community to work together and mostly all agree on solutions.
Do you ever see any possibility for Bitcoin to switch to a PoS system? I would think there's benefit in that for the big holders since they obviously have the most stake and it seems like it would completely resolve the scaling issues.
Not again :(
good, thanks 4 sharing
This is where the beauty of the free marktet comes in. If people don't see the value in the fork or if it doesn't gain any backing, support, or sever a purpose then it will just fall on its face.
If it does serve a solution then it will just take a portion of the bitcoin supporters with them making just another altcoin. This isn't bad because whatever bitcoin can stand the test of tim will be the best bitcoin and allows users to have options.
From what I am realizing hard forks are nothing more than another ICO or altcoin being created. It's good for consumers in that we get to choose which one is the best (or what we thing is the best).
Finally, all publicity is good publicity. Drops in price just means the more bitcoin I am able to purchase and part of the reason I'm ramping up my activities here on steemit!
For the most part, I agree with you. That's ok, to have many initiatives on top of the same concept. But please keep in mind there are already hundreds of colored coins on top of Bitcoin - which raises the question: "why would you pay $200 for one Bitcoin Gold, when you have the same type of minting and mining with, let's say, PeerCoin or FlorinCoin?
The question is though who will stand the test of time? Looking at BCH it's hard to tell if that was a negative overall at the time because all that happened is people moved into BCH and the price didn't plummet like it was popularly thought, although this seems to fall in the same "category" for reasons to fork as you said it's quite odd that they would bet against themselves, but I don't understand how they could undermine themselves by locking out people who can mine, as anything anti-competitive or wholly exclusive will undermine the very reason for the fork and directly drop the price as the trust in direction has went from smooth sailing to every man for themselves.
I think that their equipment won't suffer as much of in a sales loss and if it does it will be offset by what they are poised to gain should they be majority holders and the currency stabilize relatively to how BCH did when it launched. If the motivations are for long term or short, only time will tell as gniksivart said.
It's a good question, why not PeerCoin or FlorinCoin? To me it's wealth is fluid and how people use it or how they capture it, how they store it is all private preference so what Bitcoin Gold is capitalizing on is the Mainstream, seeking to create their own tributary, and this is probably directly because of the first hardforrk and what hardfork three is going to be will be will be determined on how well the previous two have done and at the current rate we could see that by the end of this year. Wealth comes into the system from the system itself and how well it serves the function, which is exactly what @gniksivart mentioned, if people don't see the value in the fork or it doesn't gain any backing, support, or serve a purpose it will just fall on it's face.
My only contention is this:
No, bad publicity is not good for the coin, it just means that those not invested already get to jump on board for cheap. A currency is good only if it can hold value, and it's perfect when it's value cannot be manipulated by supply and demand or directly otherwise, and the same for the Store of Value. A good store of value gets better with time, more exclusive and more valuable, this is true for almost all tangible things (minus elements and "money" which every year grown and grow in both supply and their value is manipulated to be wholly 90% or more based on hoarding and hedging by the producers and almost exclusively done as a monopoly over both sectors, elements and money) and a store of value that is at the whim of publicity is a poor one by default, so it's a testament that Bitcoins and Altcoins make headway because they do it by default under a piss poor standard, yet they accomplish the equivalent of fine art.
Hmmmm I wonder if we all get free Bitcoin gold if he already hold Bitcoin .... that is what happened with Bitcoin cash
Yes. The same will happen here if it actually goes through.
https://www.btcforkmonitor.info/
Most likely, yes.
Well this is going to be a shitshow and the price is going to free fall if you ask me!
PoS has it's own problems as well. There's no perfect system. I don't think there is a strategize to weaken the system, but there is a high incentive to make thyself more money. But this is how the ecosystem grows. So far so good!
Their Slack link on their FB page is no longer active. This all seems very suspect. Could be another weird ride. Thanks for sharing!
As far a I understand it, the segwit2x drama could lead to an Bitcoin fork. So we could have 4 bitcoins at the end of the year?
We already have hundreds of Bitcoins, because 80% of altcoins are based on the Bitcoin codebase, they're just branded differently. The new ones have more awareness and more marketing (and probably mining) power behind them.
I was refering more to the name confusion that will appear