Bitcoin Forum

Where is your bitcoin balance safe in the event of a hard fork?

SolarSilver summarizes the event of a hard fork so well that I lifted a post of his from another thread I started.


The confidence he speaks of only comes back for one chain...and it may not be the original.

The worst thing is, in the event of a hard fork, during all the turmoil it will cause, many will exchange their BTC for fiat. The market cap could drop substantially.

Seriously, no one wishes to offer their comment or advice on this? This is a serious question. I'm looking for real options from those of you that are more educated int the consequence of a hard fork than I am.

What's the move here? What are our options? How much time do we have?

Thanks in advance.

i don't mean to be a dick but nobody answers because this topic has been discussed to death already :)

and there are a lot of things to consider first before even trying to move a coin in my opinion and because of that the best course of action would be moving all the coins you have into cold storage before anything happens and don't touch it until things become clear.

Very soon my Bitcoin will be lovely and safe in my TREZOR, which I'm getting delivered now.  Currently I'm having to trust Blockchain with the small amount of Bitcoin that I have, which isn't ideal for me as I like to be more secure.

In the event that a fork happened, it might be a high consensus fork, in which case the BU coin will be doing better and we'd feel more secure because you know that most spending would be on the new chain.  But it seems unlikely that it would happen and a real hard fork would be really messy, so it's important to keep the Bitcoin offline and know when to sell or buy one of the chains depending on which looks like it's dominating the network.

I think that being cautious and careful in nowadays, would be just to take care on your investments, and put them up on a different assets.

The hard-fork will make all bitcoin users have also the same number of BU, so in my opinion the best thing to do is to have bitcoins, but to also buy at least 3 top altcoins, to be secured if the people on BTC will flee into Alt direction.

1. Blocksize debate is just a endless discussion.
2. Both BU and segwit have already failed to get majority of support because of some morons.
3. If BU tries to hard fork and run as independent chain without getting majority support, it will die sooner than expected.


How much time do we have?
Ans. We have more than enough time because this blocksize drama will never end and we may not see any HF soon. There were many attempts in past to split the network but all of them fails and this time also BU may not get enough support to initiate hard fork.

forking like this means suicide.
in other words miners (who have invested a lot of money in mining business) will never risk splitting bitcoin and ending up with two chains or causing any major dip in the price.
besides they can not possibly know what the price of the chain they are mining can be and that is risk enough for them not to do it without the overwhelming majority and that means only one chain remains. either this current one or a new one.

and don't think for a second that if your bitcoin amount doubles the total price also doubles. i assure you it will be less than what it is worth in total.
meaning it won't be 1000+200 or 600+600 or other things it will be 300+300 or 500+100 or something like that.

That's the main thing that scares me about a hard fork.

If it happens, you'll end up getting both chains and not knowing what to do with them.  Loads of people will panic sell one or the other and drop a lot of money into altcoins which could propel them a bit too far for Bitcoin to recover quickly and it could move into a bear market.

That in turn might even lead me to end up selling as well.  It wouldn't look so good if it was a really messy 51% split.

The answer of your question in the title.
Just sell all your bitcoins for fiat or altcoins before the hardfork,wait for a while and buy bitcoins A and bitcoins B.They both will be very cheap and one of them will increase in value very fast.
The problem is when the hardfork will happend.

hard fork does not mean automatic split.

even going soft fork can end up as a split.

the truth is there are a few different end results of hard and soft.
but those script readers only spread gossip of softs best case scenario and hard's worse case scenario to try falsely making people think soft is the only way.

first of all, all the independent implementations do NOT want a split.
that was offered ages ago and rejected.

what is wanted is a consensus upgrade of one unified network. this is why the independent devs set no deadlines or made any threats.

lets say those wanting a single merkle over 1mb base block upgrade.

if none of the nodes accept it its rejected in 2 seconds.

if a few nodes accpt it. then those nodes accept it and then its orphaned when the next block comes along. because the other nodes rejected it in a couple seconds.

if there was near 50-50 then there is much more orphan drama. taking a couple blocks of fighting to then settle down.

if there was high majority acceptance then the orphan drama cools down but in favour of the over1mb  where by the minority are then finding they are rejecting/orphaning and then being left unsynced.

the only time that there is actually a altcoin is if the nodes of opposing sides actually disconnect and ban communications with their opposing rule node.

if communication continues between nodes. then its just orphan drama

Stay synced with the longest chain, set bots to automatically double spend every ongoing transactions and deposit them all in some unused addresses lol.
Right now if we could ask all the miners to stop mining for 30 minutes so everyone could upgrade to the new version we wouldn't be here arguing, it's all about not losing the competition.

Now I have another question: when a miner includes transactions in a block and then broadcast it and nodes seeing it as valid, what happens if a TX gets double spent with much higher fee? the other miner if include that double spend what happens to the first block? if it's already mined then the original miner is already busy with his next block found and doesn't have the time to redo his last block with much higher hash power, am I getting this right or I'm some where else entirely?

That's a very fair comment. If you share the links where those discussions have happened I'll read those and lock this one down.



This is ridiculous. If you aren't willing to stick with bitcoin during the tough times, you shouldn't be involved in bitcoin at all. I don't think you're ready for bitcoin.

If you don't want to run both Core and BU full nodes get a Trezor. The Trezor devs have already said (https://blog.trezor.io/contingency-plan-bitcoin-hard-fork-b6ce85cde028) in case of a hard fork they will start up a BU backend at wallet.trezor.io so Trezor users can access their bitcoin on either chain, they just need to build in replay protection first. Expect Ledger to do the same.

I will not change into fiat. I will change into other good altcoins such as Ethereum or ZCash.

To be honest, the only thing to do is to move to another coin for some time or to turn your bitcoin for fiat, there is not much to do, if a hard fork happens the value of both coins will drop like a rock and there will not be a lot to do at that time, you could keep your coins if you want but who in his right mind wants to lose money?

in the event of a contentious hard fork i would switch to dollars. and it's quite probable i wouldn't be coming back.

if it can happen on bitcoin then it can happen with any crypto, and of course it already has with ethereum. anyone who thinks an alt is a safe haven is nuts.

What are you trying to intend? your question actually has been discussed and done already, which means this is already been threw in a waste garbage, and as far as I remembered segwit and bitcoin unlimited was also failed to achieve their intentions about it to get the vote of others in bitcoin community but the result in the end was nothing and stupid things only. :-\

I'll just leave my coins untouched if the shit hits the fan. It's going one of two ways:

1. The split would eventually result in everyone uniting behind one chain.
2. The split would become bilateral with the implementation of relay protection.

In the latter case, I would hold on to both coins to hedge by bets.

I certainly wouldn't attempt to make a transaction during a chain split without relay protection.

Lol you could always transfer everything into USDT :) hahaha. Then you don't have to worry about anything other than USD fluctuation which is a loss of a few percent of buying power each year.

Any fork that occurs will result in a "high consensus" fork...there will only be ine winner. Thanks for sharing your thoughts on Trezor.

just Hodl and dont transact in Bitcoin until things are clear.  Are you able to do that?

Holding crypto means you're ready to lose whatever it's supposed to be worth in an instant.

Store your Bitcoins in a wallet that gives you the ability to "split" your coins. I heard Jaxx wallet gave its users that choice for ETH and ETC. Maybe they will do the same for BTC and BTU.

Thanks Jon, the question is where to hodl.


What??? So it's definitely going to result in a split.

I'm glad i asked the question (even if it has been asked before) because it seems like a lot of ppl din't even know what the consequences are going to be, like what possible outcomes exist. Is thing really that confusing to so many?

This is wrong and stupid. Just ignore it. If you own bitcoins now and there's is a hard fork you now own the exact same amount of bitcoin A as you do bitcoin B. If you believe in one more, sell the other and go all in on one chain. There is no certain wallet that you need (I mean core... not some random third party app that no one's ever heard of).

Take your money and use it to buy jewlery off QVC. Always great prices on QVC.

what do you mean "where"? bitcoin is not a physical thing to hold it somewhere, you only need private keys to spend transactions that are already on the blockchain and belong to your key.
and this means hold those private keys. unless by where you mean where to hold those private keys? in which case the answer is in any wallet that you control the private keys, such as paper wallet, any desktop wallet such as Core, Electrum,... and NOT on third party services that don't give you control over private keys such as Coinbase or any exchange service.


a split only happens if there were no consensus.
there has been at least one hard fork in bitcoin and since it was done a long time ago and it was done with overwhelming majority supporting the fork, no split happened. the same thing is still true.

what he said could be true if exchange didn't say already that they will list BU as an altcoin, therefore the value will not be affected on the main chain too much, we see that investors already pumped again the value to what it was before

this mean that in the case of anyone spending two times on both chain, he/she will likely end with more value than today and not less like he say, the best thing to do is holding for now and see what happen

Safe own both sides of the Fork continue HODL
If you really want then go into an Altcoin or Cash for a while then buy in as each side tries to sell their unwanted parts.

A fork, if it happened is not going to occur that suddenly, if you keep watch of the news or the forum you will know the fork is coming day or even weeks before it, what would you do then if you have the opportunity to get out of bitcoin before the fork happens? Will you keep your coins or do something else.

No, what I mean is Jaxx could offer a feature to protect your coins from replay attacks and end up truly receiving your BTU from the other chain. They did it with ETH and ETC, they could do it again with BTC and BTU.

>Falling for the USDT meme
If it didn't end up hitting $0.95 at a point I would be a lot more confident in it, but since they weren't able to keep it at the 1:1 there's a lot of worry for how valuable and safe anything in USDT would actually be.

Maybe it's a lot better than I think it is right now, but based on the news I heard from people that I recently respect when it comes to things like cryptos, I won't be holding my breath.

Can't you just keep your coins on both chains and whichever chain ends up being the "official" chain you focus more on? I don't know why you would have to worry about anything too extreme. Most of your security should just come down to having the private key of your wallet available for both chains, and I don't think that there's much else that you'd have to be worried about for the most part. Just let the community decide or exploit the opportunities, either one works.

The moment an hardfork occurs on bitcoin that will be the moment
will bitcoin truly die because both the A chain and the B chain are just power greedy capitalist.
I dont know why some people says that the core devs are owned by bankers when the core group has been maintaining bitcoin's welfare.

Considering central banks have difficulty pegging their currencies, I'm not convinced any crypto can. I won't touch USDT with a barge pole.

Nobody knows what those who want to manipulate bitcoin want. But I know what all people think first of all about how to multiply their capital. And secondly they think about the rest of the people. Fork is a section of power and influence