BITCOIN FORK INFORMATION

Some information here for those that may or may not know about the impending Bitcoin fork... it is an interesting read that explains a lot of things and answers question that people may have.

The key points written are that is could be split in to two camps: Bitcoin Core and Bitcoin Unlimted.

The camp supporting Bitcoin Core: This camp supports keeping the block size as it is, i.e. 1 Mb, yet they propose code optimization to shrink the size of transactions along with other approaches to increase the bitcoin transaction throughput rate via means of a “soft fork”. This camp mainly supports the “Segregated Witness” (Segwit) upgrade as a solution that mitigates many bitcoin bugs and also opens the way for further scaling using off-chain solutions such as the “lightning network”.

The camp supporting Bitcoin Unlimited: This camp supports Bitcoin Unlimited which is a bitcoin client forked off Bitcoin Core and designed to process transactions into blocks whose size is greater than the current limit of 1 Mb. With Bitcoin Unlimited, miners are able to independently choose the size of blocks they will produce. As per coin.dance, 9.2% of nodes across bitcoin’s network currently run the Bitcoin Unlimited client.

If a hard fork occurs depending on how you store your bitcoins, e.g. desktop wallet, online wallet, exchange…etc, you can expect one of three scenarios:

1. All of your coins will become BTC only

2. All of your coins will become BTU only.

3. Your coins will be doubled, so if you had 2 coins before the fork occurs, you will have 2 BTC and 2 BTU after forking is completed.

The exact outcome depends on how you are storing your coins and whether or not you control the private keys of your bitcoins. If you store your coins using an online wallet or a cryptocurrency exchange, then you don’t control your private keys, so you are letting another entity choose the fate of your coins.

To ensure that you will have both BTC and BTU, in event of a fork, you should store your coins via a local wallet on your machine, so that you would be controlling your coins’ private keys.