Bitcoin Forum

How much does it cost to fork bitcoin?   ::)

The cost to fork Bitcoin is free. One merely needs to make an incompatible change to the software that will fork the network.

The cost of a Bitcoin fork (like Bgold) is externalized onto the ecosystem. Newbies get scammed by downloading malware wallets or naively inputting their private keys into nefarious web wallets. Exchanges and wallet services need to spend endless hours building new wallet infrastructures to safely handle coins on both chains. This is particularly true if the fork has no replay protection. And if there is no replay protection, there are potentially huge losses for users, both because of individual mistakes (not splitting coins) and custodial mistakes (exchanges/wallet services fucking up and losing coins).

So, it's free for the fork devs. And there might be "free money" in it for those who can properly secure their money and split their coins. But there are certainly costs involved.....

The devs that decide to pre-mine the fork (like Bitcoin Gold) definitely get a nice premium. Some devs can also know what exchanges are going to list their fork before the big public, which means they move their BTC to these exchanges to have instant liquidity to dump the fork for BTC if want to, and in general manipulate the price. A lot of price manipulation is going on on all forks, BCash mostly, and now Bitcoin Diamond too.

It can be considered free money tho... as a BTC user, you don't really lose anything, other than time securing you access the coins properly and the fees, but if you do it at the right time, you can find profit on that.

The only scenario where it is not free at fundamental levels is when the fork uses SHA256, because the fork competes against BTC for the hashrate (which is why BCash is an attack on Bitcoin).

Lots of altcoins use SHA256. Are they all attacks? Fundamentally, at the protocol level, I don't think Bcash is an attack on Bitcoin. Anyone should be able to fork an open source software as they see fit. It's up to the market to reject them as cash grabs and copy/paste coins if that's what they are. Since markets aren't efficient and because information in this market is asymmetric, newbies will get fleeced trying to buy into "the next Bitcoin." Such is life.

But Bitmain's spam attacks and Roger Ver's disinformation campaign -- those are attacks on Bitcoin. Attaining a near-monopoly on the manufacture of BTC mining rigs and then forcing miners to pay for them in BCH... I think that's an attack on Bitcoin.

Bcash's biggest supporters are certainly attacking Bitcoin. Calvin Ayre said as much. But I think there is such a thing as "fork etiquette" and I'd like to think that, in theory, communities can split from one another without it being viewed as an "attack."

The price of bitcoin fork is FREE but when it reaches the fundamental level (when the fork uses SHA256) it is not free.

There is an open-source code available to every developer if they ever decide to change the rules and get it accepted based on the consensus ratio of the community, so it doesn't cost them a dime rather than an idea and some time behind changing the rules and codes that are to be implemented to show some (most) difference about their coins from major Bitcoin. They just split it from the real chain but continue to work with the same blockchain style (based on my understanding) but with different features (here: rules). What they are possibly doing is, they know they won't be asked for anything to split another coin out of bitcoin, which is why they use the brand's name ahead of their bullshit coin in order to gain the attention they can't get through promoting it without the name itself. This way, they know they can make much more money than us.

Right now, the industry is incentivizing forks too much, the fact that it's free and that it seems almost every new fork trades at a nonzero value for at least some time means developers have such a strong incentive to create forks.

The upside is that, with each new fork, its potential impact on the actual industry will be diminishing over time due to us all get desensitized to new forks while the media hype becomes less potent with each subsequent fork as well.