Bitcoin Forum

Hey guys, Been spending a lot of time searching the threads for a good description on the upcoming fork, found bits and pieces but nothing complete. Also what is a fork in general.

Can you explain what exactly will happenn and why? Explain it like its your 5th grade cousin.  BTC Thoughts?

SegWit2x was scheduled for November 2017. The developers confirmed that the hardfork will take place on block 494'784, which will be generated in November. After activating the protocol Bitcoin will switch to the improved Segregated Witness technology. This technology does not fit in with blockchain Bitcoin, and the first attempt was crowned with the appearance of Bitcoin Cash. And this time the developers do not exclude the appearance of another fork Bitcoin.

If in November there will be another split in the Bitcoin network, then this will be the third fork, which can lead to the distribution of capital and resources to three sides. To avoid a split, it is necessary to collect support for 92% of the network capacity. At the end of September, there is no such support, only 87% support SegWit2x. It says only one thing - the split can not be avoided.

The best way out for Bitcoin (BTCBTC) in the current situation will be if all new forks (bch & new) do not get user support and eventually disappear from the market.
And Bitcoin with the updated protocol will continue its journey.

No. Segregrated Witness is already active on the network and has been active since August. The fork in November is a hard fork that doubles the block weight limit that Segwit set when it activated.

Right, so it will go to 2MB, I see.

However, my question is more simple than that. Basically, just like BBC, Bitcoin Gold creates a new coin. So, in essence, at Time 0 of the fork, we have 2 coins in existence as a very similar to each other, BTC and Bitcoin Gold (with the 2 MB segwit)? Right? And so at this point, either one can move to dominate the market?? Bitcoin Gold could theoretically overtake BTC in popularity and adoption? So Bitcoin Gold is just another Altcoin that we get free because the fork is from the same blockchain as BTC?

No, it will actually go to 8 MB. It changes the block weight to be 8 million which makes the largest theoretical block size to be ~8 MB.

Bitcoin Gold and segwit2x are two completely different things. They are just like Bitcoin Cash in that they are just altcoins. Because they share a history with Bitcoin, anyone who holds Bitcoin at the time of the fork has the same amount of coins in the forked chain.

So basically the "fork" is just the creation of a near-identical bitcoin altcoin? And thus, all the buzz about a fork is the question if the new and improved bitcoin will overtake the original? Am I understanding this correctly?

Yes.

I would explain it a bit different (a bit more technically but I hope still understandable, maybe ELI10 ;D):

A hard fork is a situation where new blocks are attached to the chain according to new rules that are incompatible with the old rules.

Legacy clients would build and validate blocks that are following the old rules. But beginning with the "fork block" these old rules would not be viewed as valid anymore by the "new" clients, so they would reject all blocks coming from legacy clients.

Segwit2x is a hard fork, but as there are many Bitcoin users that prefer to stay with the original chain, a likely outcome is a chain split, because many users (probably the majority of non-mining nodes) would never upgrade. So both chains continue to exist, but one of them will take the lead.

I predict the leader will be the "legacy/Core" chain if Segwit2x does not reach at least 85% (maybe only 90% would be enough) of the hashrate for more than a few days.

Well its gonna be the month of November that counts for this bitcoin Fork. I bet this person is in love and loves November thats why he basis his luck on there month of November 

I'm learning something new! Interesting.

So hypothetically if I have for example, 5 bitcoin in a personal wallet such as blockchain.info or some other private wallet, will the new BTC altcoin appear in this wallet as well?

That's interesting so essentially a fork is an update of the rules but since there isn't a consensus the chains fork. Clearly a lot of companies have withdrawn their support from the NYA but doesn't this allow us the reconsider the whole situation. Continuing with the fork right now is just stupid and very narrow-minded.

That depends on the wallet you are using. Most likely you must do something actively to "claim" your new altcoins - the most common way is installing a "forkcoin client" and import the private key there. But you can do that whenever you want, there is no deadline (so there is no need to hurry).

Only if you are using a centrally controlled online wallet like Coinbase and the company has explicitly stated that it will support both coins and credit them automatically, then you will receive the coins without having to do nothing. That happened at some exchanges (e.g. Bittrex) when Bitcoin Cash forked.

(But you really shouldn't use such services. Electrum, for example, is almost as easy to use as blockchain.info.)

Yes they will but they will not be visible immediately. If you own x amount of bitcoin in a wallet over which you have control of private keys then after the dork has been resolved you will have equal amount of the forked altcoin in that wallet. But to claim that amount you have do something yourself. Like for bitcoin cash claiming Electrum released the Electron Cash wallet and there is a method to claim BCH using that. Several other exchanges and casino bankroll investment sites like crypto-games asked users to put in BCH wallet address to claim their BCH if they had invested any BTC in their bankroll.

Actually, no one major company has left the agreement. F2pool is still signalling in support of Segwit2x, so it's not clear what their intentions are. I believe the only signatories who left were Wayniloans, SURBTC, and Bitwala. I'm not familiar with any of them after being around in this space for 4 years. Xapo and Blockchain recently reaffirmed their intention to support 2X as "Bitcoin/BTC" if miners follow through.


If private keys in that wallet contain BTC, then they will contain both coins after the fork, yes. But the opt-in replay protection in BTC1 was removed, so the only safe thing to do is not transact at all around/after the fork. Hopefully a form of replay protection will be added to the fork so that it's safe and easy to split the coins and send them to different wallets.

will a fork like this have much impact on Difficulty?

Bitcoin is still  a mystery to most of  the people. Because of the popularity and growth many investors have enjoyed buying bitcoins .Like the first few years people were unaware of how to use internet or make benefit from it.One of the aspects of Bitcoin is it allows perfect anonymity.All transactions are recorded publically on the blockchain .It is easy to conceal your identity and make perfectly anonymous transaction,that is valuable for privacy and security.

Will the fork cause the same price difference than the different fork?

I don't get what you mean by: "It's not visible immediately."
If bitcoin ends up forking the whole blockchain will be copied until the point of the fork. So as soon as it forks your bitcoin will also be on the forked chain. But in order to claim them you need to wait until a safe wallet is available, not to mention the risk of replay attacks.

Bitcoin Gold is scheduled to go live sometime in November. And what do we know about it.

This.
BTG is the brainchild of Jack Liao and is launching as a hard fork of Bitcoin. As any coin goal is to become a better gold than Bitcoin. Changing proof-of-work is generally going to require a hard fork and BTG has decided to go that route. The proof-of-work that they’ve chosen is Equihash, a memory-hard algorithm that’s fairly ASIC resistant and also used by ZCash. Is this ASIC resistange good solution, maybe, they’re different from CPUs in that they do only one thing, but they do it really, really well.

Hard fork is planed to be on October 25, 2017, is that does not mean that their coin launches on that day. For the moment it might be early November release, which means that their blockchain will have no blocks for a week or so in between.

This leaves final questin, how much will it be worth. Basically, if Bitcoin Gold isn’t worth very much (less than 0.0001 BTC or so), it’s probably not worth doing anything. If it’s actually worth something (say 0.01 BTC or higher), there will be tools that wallet developers will most likely write so you can access your Bitcoin Gold.

Excellent explanation azguard! Thank you!

With the fork creating a new bitcoin in Bitcoin Gold, it doesnt actually do anything to BTC. My question is thus - can BTC be improved without a fork? Will it ever be able to increase processing bandwidth or transaction size without completely changing the code and creating a new coin, is this what SegWit2x is supposed to do? Or is BTC maxed out now in regards to speed and transaction size?

From my understanding, you can make changes to the code of bitcoin and improve various aspects of it without a hard-fork. If there is consensus by everyone, then there is no split. The split happens because people literally switch over to the other version of the code. Imagine every machine running one code and then, on the hard-fork, a number of machines start running the new code --> This is the split at the fundamental level.

The new code needs a whole new infrastructure (wallets, etc.) and will be "competing" with the legacy code for users, miners, etc. If users don't migrate, then miners won't have much reward as there will not be any serious bid on the price either. This will be a self-reinforcing cycle to make the chain irrelevant, as is becoming the case with Bitcoin Cash.

The real issue is when people want to assign the name Bitcoin and the symbol BTC to the new code. That can become very problematic, as people will be confused as to which one is which and that can lead to some serious disruption. Some companies seem to want to do that on this fork and, if they do and the fork gains momentum, then we will have potentially more serious issues to deal with than network speed and high fees.

These are my observations so far, let's hope for the best!

True you can make changes anytime, bu think that this time they really done it. 3 bitcoin different ones, pls this is becoming something that is just for fun.
If someone have a idea, other dont agree, then he/she/they create new bitcoin.

Bottom line is that this will not be last of bitcoin name coin that we see, if this works well (many think that it will cuz of free coins they will get), then i expect that we could have every year some new bitcoin name coin.

I find it pretty annoying that we're experiencing yet anther hard fork that will split the chains. The bitcoin gold one is certainly not hostile towards bitcoin (they don't consider themselves bitcoin) but I dislike the fact that they have bitcoin in their name. It just causes a lot of confusion. People I know in real life who aren't into really into crypto asked me what bitcoin cash is and if it is bitcoin as well. I don't have anything against forks like bitcoin gold but I think people who fork the bitcoin chain need to come up with a name that doesn't have 'bitcoin' in it.

Yeah, I agree. I think subverting the bitcoin name is one of the greater risks to mass adoption. I have had similar questions asked, but as long as people are educated, things can still move forward. Anything that has some great potential will face fights/resistance and things of this sort, we just have to push though it and I think the core devs are staying their ground really well - if it weren't for them, we would have probably crashed and burned this thing a good while ago!

For a person that doesn't truly understand how the forks are done as I don't have any background knowledge to programming and coding then it is really hard to explain to someone who will just enter the bitcoin world. I do read the description of how it is done but there are some jargon that I can't understand so I try to explain it in a much simple way that we both can relate. With so many versions of bitcoin, people will be confuse of what bitcoin is the true one and we can expect as well that bitcoin gold is not the last one to be made because of a fork. Those people who doesn't even have an idea of what crypto is even considered altcoin as bitcoin so how much more if in its name there is bitcoin in it. I agree that the forks should be named with no "bitcoin" as it gets confusing and there are others who even claimed that they are the true bitcoin.

But this new coins from the fork will not affect the number of BTC that is on the market right? but why is it affecting the price of BTC whenever a fork is about to happen. Will the new coin also be mine-able or the quantity will be fixed on the quantity that BTC is currently circulating?

It's true that the number of BTC is not affected. But the effect on the price of BTC is essentially the
market pricing in the potential for adverse impacts in the future.

For instance, as many of the previous posts have pointed out, just the fact that BitcoinGold or
BitcoinCash has Bitcoin in the name creates confusion (and therefore potential of negative impacts
on Bitcoin adoption.) There's also a chance (albeit small) that the new coin will actually take over
and become dominant, thereby also reducing the value of Bitcoin.

What will happen if the block size change to 8 MB, Hopefully it will solve higher fees and confirmation time.

Confusion is last of worries. What they all think that t will bring them large amount of free cash/coin after this form. Most likely it will have negative impact, cuz no news of development have been made, except that its coming 25th this month. Large amount of buys have been made and many expect to see price be like it was with bitcoin cash. Maybe im wrong but this time i dont expect to see even half of the price that was with bitcoin cash, they have at least some support in that but here i didnt find out anything.

Me personally I don't think it's going to be enough computer power or money really invested  for any of those forks to be successful.

None of those supporters have close to 100 B, to disrupt the network.

But I'm not a tech guy so I can be wrong.

That's just my opinion

So I recently purchased a Ledger Nano S and when I got it I created an address and moved my BTC to it. However, it turns out that the address it created is a new format (SegWIT or something - the public address starts with a 3).

Do I need to do anything ahead of either of the upcoming forks (BTG or the SEGWIT2X hard fork). Do I need to move my BTC again to a legacy address?
Thanks in advance for your help - I have tried to investigate myself but not found any info.

Bitcoin Address, Starts with 1 or 3. In case you mean by "public address" a bitcoin address

So Bitcoin Gold forked with minimal fireworks...

Coinbase also announced that segwit2x will be call B2X on thier platform. Does the segwit2x update create a new coin?? Why is Coinbase labeling it at B2X?

It technically hasn't even launched yet. They just now have the UTXO/blockchain snapshot that they want.

Segwit2x is a hard fork, so it will create an altcoin.

The November event is actually an attempt by Central Bank Oriented people to destroy bitcoin. It is similar to Bitcoin Cash. All are futile attempts to  destroy Bitcoin. They are always complaining about scalability. Even though Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin Gold does not even know how to address such problems. Increasing the block size is stupid. You will need to increase it periodically maybe every 5 years or so. Which is stupid. As stupid as the Central Banks.

I agree with you, the block size doesn't completely solve the scalability issue. Five years is a long time in software. If that was all that was required I think that wouldn't be an issue.  I'm surprised they aren't ok with at least alleviating the problem in the short term.

Actually the Coinbase announcement is a big setback for the "Segwit2x movement". It means that the Segwit2x supporters will have a very hard time to convince ordinary users that they are "the Bitcoin" and not "an altcoin". That is crucial for them, because otherwise ordinary users (those that don't have a clear stance in the block size question) would continue to use the legacy clients.

I think with this announcement Segwit2x is almost dead, because as an altcoin it would not survive (or only as a very small coin) and Big Blockers would use Bitcoin Cash instead. The only chance Segwit2x still has is to achieve 90% of the hashrate for a long time (that would need miners with really big pockets), or attack Bitcoin in a way that forces the legacy chain to hard-fork to another algorithm.

This was the consensus opinion based on their first blog post a few days ago. But you seem to have missed their follow-up announcement. Read here: https://twitter.com/coinbase/status/922992686512070657


Before, during, and after the fork, Coinbase will refer to the legacy chain as "Bitcoin." However, after a period of time (at their discretion), they will begin referring to the chain with most accumulated difficulty as "Bitcoin" whether that is the legacy chain or the 2x fork. They have basically taken the position of Blockchain and Xapo, which is actually a huge victory for the "Segwit2x movement." It means if miners switch to 2x, the 2x chain gets the name "Bitcoin" (for Coinbase customers).

This is interesting, I am glad to be here. I am a newbie, though I heard about bitcoin late last year, I am eager to learn more