Bitcoin Forum

After Bitcoin Cash split from the main Bitcoin blockchain, a plethora of other cryptocurrencies followed suit. First came Bitcoin Cash, then came Bitcoin Diamond, Bitcoin Gold, Bitcoin SV, and so on. Each fork is basically the same Bitcoin with an identical supply (21 million coins) and genesis block. What makes them different is their approach to scalability. Every Bitcoin fork that is created, essentially multiplies Bitcoin's total supply two or three times its size. This is sort of a double spend (although not in a direct manner). Imagine if we had 10 Bitcoin spinoffs, that means the supply will increase to 210,000! I'd bet if the Bitcoin Cash hard fork didn't happen, we'd still have only one Bitcoin (BTC) with a price higher than today. I'm still wrapping my head around this so please correct me if I'm wrong.

Do you think Bitcoin-based forks (spinoffs) will devalue the original Bitcoin (BTC) over the long term? If not, why? Don't we have too many forks already? Your input will be greatly appreciated. Thanks. :)

How Many Bitcoin Forks Are There? You will be surprised!!!
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5221882
Interesting article, see where these coins are now!
If some shitty project calls its coin bitcoin, then I don't think it will greatly affect the price of bitcoin.

As the saying goes "Imitation is a form of flattery". However, I don't think this is applicable to BTC though. It is the prime mover obviously, that's why it has a lot of spinoffs, however, it will doesn't have a negative effect, on the contrary it will make BTC stronger as it will get more consensus support from investors. We have seen the majority of the members here, doesn't like fork coins, maybe because of the people behind, or simply that they see it is a "threat", hence they stay with the original BTC.

Not entirely accurate, since hard forks when not considered by the consensus to be Bitcoin, aren't Bitcoin. Forking Bitcoin, doesn't mean that its Bitcoin, the same as using the code Bitcoin has, to create a coin with a different name isn't Bitcoin. Its another altcoin. For example, I think you would be hard pressed to find a supporter of Bitcoin, consider Bitcoin Cash as Bitcoin.

What your really asking is will altcoins effect Bitcoin's price, and the answer is probably yes. Although, predicting how it will effect it or how it has effected it, would be difficult to measure. I would expect that the popularity of altcoins has increased exposure of Bitcoin though, and has impacted it more positively rather than negatively.

Although, it has to be said if there is a better alternative to Bitcoin, then of course it has the potential of devaluing Bitcoin. If there's a better alternative, that fixes the issues of Bitcoins, while not having any drawbacks that outweigh the positives, its quite likely that it would devalue Bitcoin. Depending on how many people would make the switch. I've said this a few times, but Bitcoin has quite a few issues which has been discussed to death, but it is currently the best out there, and eventually we might be referring to Bitcoin as the foundation that started it all, rather than the solution to the problem. There are definitely some interesting technologies, and ideas coming out of the woodwork, e.g MimbleWimble, but their current implementation isn't quite there yet.

Almost all people who invvest in Bcash, BSV and other Bitcoin clone scamcoins are people who hate Bitcoin, and they simply wouldn't hold hold Bitcoin if those shitcoins didn't exist. The amount of people who were honestly choosing between Bitcoin and forks and choose forks is so negligible, that in this hypothetical scenario where forks didn't exist, the price would be only tiny fractions of percent higher. You can't just take marketcaps of forks and threat them as shards of Bitcoin's value. Billions of dollars of marketcap can be created out of thin air in an instant in the crypto world.

We literally got a lot of forks already that deals with what they think is better for bitcoin. I do agree that if there are no forks around the market today then most of those market caps will go to bitcoin but it could possibly be as the same scenario that we've got today. Because there are too many altcoins that's also being chosen by many pickers that chooses altcoins aside from bitcoin. But I do not think that there's any chance that another fork will devalue bitcoin. It's like the gold that we've got in real life while we still use cash, an actual store of value just as the reason why we hold it.

Knowing that these forked-off communities are huge minorities, not really. The effect on bitcoin's value is just so minuscule that it might as well not exist.

On the other hand, it might do have a small effect on people's perception of Bitcoin. Though definitely wrong, some people actually think that creating a Bitcoin fork means that you're inflating Bitcoin's supply. One of those people being Peter Schiff himself.

They are altcoins and altcoins can not devalue Bitcoin. It does not matter only because they are Bitcoin forks.

How Many Bitcoin Forks Are There? You will be surprised!!! (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5221882.0)

In very short term, in altcoin seasons, capital can be spent to altcoins but it does not mean Bitcoin will be devalue in altcoin seasons. Bitcoin usually is sideway in altcoin seasons or it has a very good growth and is a first fire that activates altcoin seasons.

Without Bitcoin, no altcoin season so altcoins can not devalue Bitcoin.

We're practicing decentralization here and therefore anyone wanting to make a change to the code of bitcoin should be allowed to and it's left for the community to decide. We have countless amount of bitcoin forks already and something tells me we're likely to have equal amount to be forked in future. The possibility is now high as the forks could also be forked and bring about forked coins but neither could devalue the original which is Bitcoin.

Some will compete with the market capitalization of bitcoin and adoption (acceptance from the community) in the short term just as Bitcoin cash tried but in the long term, they won't be a threat to the growth of Bitcoin. Just like other altcoins, these forked will have to rely on the success of bitcoin to be able to get any attention on them and that alone says it all as they'll still need Bitcoin to survive.

For this to even be possible, the industry has to stop depending on bitcoin and its market dominance has to drop it the lowest of level (if possible, to one digit dominance) but that's unlikely to happen as the whole industry is built around the success of Bitcoin and don't think anyone is ready to risk not making Bitcoin the center of attraction to see how the market will react (off course it'll crumble).

Why would they take value out of something that already proved itself valuable amidst the ocean of copy cats? If people see value on forks, then it's good, though I don't think that the general sentiment of the market will be swayed just because one small group thinks that their forked version of bitcoin is better and more superior than that of the main one. There will surely be more forks in the future, and it is up to the public on whether they would choose it over bitcoin or not.

Whether the bitcoin spin off will devalue bitcoin in the long run will usually depend on their country. Even if the government gives legitimacy and the people show high demand for it the use of bitcoin will increase bitcoin now has to be accepted as a legal tender in all financial transactions in the country except for businesses that do not have bitcoin transaction technology. Bitcoin or cryptocurrency is the easiest and best way for groups if people know how to use it properly it will become valuable in the market.

Just take a look at the market cap of all forked Bitcoins and you will answer your own question.
I remember that some of the big Bitcoin hardforks actually pumped the Bitcoin price,because the traders started buying more BTC,expecting to get some forked "Bitcoin" like BCH for free,and those BCH actually had some value on the market.
In the long term,more people will dump these forked "Bitcoins"(BCH/BSV) and their value will go down.
I don't see how this will devalue Bitcoin Core.
 

One of the forks you mentioned was actually a fork of a fork (SV forked off Cash), so we know just how ridiculous the notion was that these forks happened to "preserve" values or ideals.

I don't think it's just scalability that makes their approach different (but isn't scalability how most coins anyway primarily choose to differ?). Some made important changes to consensus algorithm I believe.

But multiplying Bitcoin supply? That's nonsense:) And we DO have 10 spinoffs... much, much more. There's nothing preventing a hundred or thousand more. That doesn't dilute Bitcoin. If anything, the existence and subsequent failures of all these forks substantiate the value of Bitcoin.

Unfortunately people come with politics and greed as part of their human characteristics, so Satoshi Nakamoto made provision for hard forks when those characteristics come into play. We saw how Mike Hearn and Gavin Andresen underestimated their support and they tried to take over the Bitcoin (BTC) project ...and when they failed, they created a hard fork to sabotage it and to be in control of their own copy of Bitcoin and that failed too.  ::)

Roger Ver pushed hard to change people's perception that Bitcoin Cash was "the real"  ::) Bitcoin and that failed too, because people quickly see through scams and trickery and enough facts are out there to discredit these claims. These Alt coins will never be "the real" Bitcoin and it is not diluting the real coin.  ;)

Heck, while those Bitcoin forks are getting lower than lower as expected, they don't even deserve to be in the first page of CMC. I know altcoins are controversial here, I still believe that a lot of other projects deserves far more recognition compared to these forks(especially Faketoshi coin).

I think that it won't although I think a lot of the users think so, probably because bitcoin has increased in prices even though there was a lot of bitcoin forks before we reached the current ATH.

Forks will only make Bitcoin stronger.  While anyone can create a Bitcoin replica and release it to the public, besides Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin SV most other forks have a very negligible market cap.  Even if you watch these two closely, you would find out they have a fake volume and likely a strong price manipulating strategy anyway.

Scalability issues are not gone with Bitcoin Cash or other forks.  They are not gone until Bitcoin Cash gets to the same level of transactions per day Bitcoin has now.  Only then we can compare and see whether the fork has solved what Bitcoin has been struggling with so far.  If Bitcoin Cash proves their solution to scalability is worth it, Bitcoin will immediately get an upgrade and Bitcoin Cash or other forks will once again be deemed worthless.

Unless Bitcoin finds a proper competitor, it will not be devalued by useless and worthless replicas.  They will never cease to exist but Bitcoin will never cease its spot in front of a fake.

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Regards,
PrivacyG

Yes initially, fork coins will take some market value from bitcoin. The amount of market share will depend on how much hype the coin has. But after a while the market share will consolidate back into bitcoin. To further understand this phenomenon look in to bitcoin dominance and how it oscillates cyclically against altcoins including forks.

I would not completely agree with that statement, because while there are those who have definitely switched to the dark side, the largest percentage of those who invest in alt Bitcoins are those who do not know the difference between Bitcoin originally conceived and launched by Satoshi and more than 100 copies which appeared after that.

Apart from ignorance and confusion, many are attracted by the price, which is much lower with forks - so someone would rather buy one whole BTCxxx for $300 than buy 0.00100000 BTC for the same amount. Of course, the promotion factor should not be neglected either - because a lot of money has been invested and is still being invested in the shilling of those coins. Just take the example of a domain controlled by the famous Bitcoin Judas (RV).

no, it will have no effect on bitcoin in the long run. although in the future there will be another hard fork and produce a new copy of bitcoin, there will be no significant impact for bitcoin development. because people prefer to hold BTC, and assume all copies are altcoins. if it is possible to devalue bitcoin, it should have happened since the first hard fork. but the reality is not like that.

I don't think it will devalue Bitcoin. Maybe very slightly as those advocating the fork may not be ok with what's happening around BTC. But they also know that not having BTC in your portfolio is quite naive. Even Roger Ver I guarantee still holds a lot of BTC compared to his Bitcoin Cash holdings.

The only thing you can fork is the database. Everything that has been built around a certain coin, the whole ecosystem, community and partnerships and whatever you want to think of, simply can't be forked.

The hard fork of bitcoin will not have a chance to compete with bitcoin because they are split from the main bitcoin blockchain. It is no problem if there are more hard forks because that will not affect bitcoin. Bitcoin price itself will still increase as we predict, while the hard-fork coin can not follow in price. Yes, the hard-fork coin will be an altcoin, but that can help us profit too as bitcoin, but the profit will not be bigger.

Bitcoin spinoffs, how hadn't I thought of this before? I'll be using it from now on.  :P

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Actually, Bitcoin spinoffs devalue themselves over the long term, not Bitcoin itself. There are no Bitcoin Cash or ABC or SV users that actually believe they'll surpass Bitcoin. There are some minor exceptions (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4985868.msg57422190#msg57422190), but not the canon.

Bitcoin is being devaluated if the hard fork is promoted as the real Bitcoin with cunning propaganda. For example, Craig Wright promotes Bitcoin SV as the real Bitcoin which may devaluate the real one slightly and temporarily.

So, no. I don't believe they do it over the long term.

Just because someone makes a claim doesn't mean it is true. For example bcash block size is 0.15 bitcoin block size, in other words they didn't scale shit.

Wrong.
If I print US dollars on my printer do I increase US dollar's total supply?

No it is not.

Wrong again. Imagine your own signature campaign that is paying you in bitcoin, if they pay you the same amount in bcash (that is 0.0022 bcash) would you accept it?
Now you see how ridiculous your claims look?

That can be said about any shitcoin that has been created so far. Do you think Dash hasn't claimed to be "better bitcoin" a hundred times? Because it has.

In short term they can always cause some drama, like they did back in 2017 when bcash was mining thousands of blocks per day, but at the end of the day they are still considered shitcoins and in long run their prices will always keep going down so nobody cares about what they do.

As long as spinoffs are the minority, Bitcoin's value will remain untouched for the foreseeable future. Some people think new forks simply inflate the total supply of Bitcoin. But it really doesn't work that way. I've thought about this at first, when Bitcoin Cash was born back in August 2017.

What matters is that Bitcoin stays true of the decentralization and censorship-resistant properties of Blockchain tech. Bitcoin will only become scarcer with each block reward halving. I'd be disappointed if developers increase Bitcoin's max supply in the future. That would ruin the deflationary model of Bitcoin. As long as supply remains the same, Bitcoin will only rise in value over time. Just my thoughts ;D

It wouldn't happen simply because literally not a single Bitcoiner is incentivized to support such change. Not only it would affect the deflationary part, but more importantly, Bitcoin's predictable and solid monetary policy.

Bitcoin is scarce because it has a max supply, with each block halving this is not going to change since every block is introducing new coins to the circulating supply, in other words the supply is increasing.

Developers don't own the right to change bitcoin, this is not some shitcoin like ethereum where the owner flips a switch and blocks are reversed :)
Developers can only write code and make proposals, it is the community that has to accept or reject them.

Actually the value will continue to rise as long as the "demand" is rising which is the adoption.

We've witnessed this before, those fork doesn't compare or doesn't even beat the original coin that they have just copied. It will just always the "copy cat" and investors always choose the origin. Like bitcoin, they made different forks, different altcoins just to compensate those weakness of it but until now, the value is increasing.

Bitcoin is probably benefiting from the amount of hard forks there has been and the amount of other altcoins that have been created because they usually fail which begs the question to the people investing why has this coin failed and not Bitcoin which would hopefully encourage them to check out the technical differences and see why Bitcoin is superior.

As long as the majority stays with Bitcoin (BTC), nothing else matters. Forks are simply copies of the original project. Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin SV, and other derivatives will never surpass Bitcoin in terms of market cap and mainstream adoption because they simply "mimic" the original Blockchain network. There's a lot more to crypto than just adding a minor tweak like increasing the block size for on-chain scalability.

Most people still use Bitcoin regardless of the high fees and slow transaction confirmation times, simply because it's the most decentralized and trusted cryptocurrency in the world. The ever-rising number of forks means that the whole space is decentralized and open source. If it wasn't like that, Bitcoin would've been the only cryptocurrency in existence today. I don't think spinoffs will make a huge impact over Bitcoin's price in the long term if only a small minority support them. Just my opinion :)

No they won't. There are hundreds of bitcoin forks. Anyone can make a fork. Most of them dies. Others barely survive. Once they fork, they are no longer bitcoin or related to bitcoin at all. There can only be one bitcoin. It would have devalued bitcoin if it affected the supply of bitcoin. But forks don't do that. Moreover, when forks happen, you own both the coins. It's not like you will have to dump bitcoin to get your fork. It might (highly unlikely) causes some affect on the price, but the affect is usually short lived. Forks are just another shitcoin ;).

I can still remember those years when forks were then a trendy and people can still be swayed to support them. right now, we don't care already if there will be another fork of Bitcoin or not because we are now sure that spinoffs will never be better than the original and that they will never be able to be on the same level as Bitcoin. Now, having said that, I don't really think that these spinoffs popular or not are big hindrance to the growth of Bitcoin...this is not like those fake designer jeans coming from sweatshop of some developing countries.

Never say never right? I think having forks is less annoying than many people argue. It is an important feature that allows for political/technical decisions what the community might deem the best way to got forward for Bitcoin. You are correct that so far the original Bitcoin is still the version most people trust but generally speaking it is good to have the possibility to fork (which is essentially because it is open source).

The Bitcoin fork just borrowed the code of Bitcoin and distributed the coins to Bitcoin holders in direct proportion to Bitcoin. Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin SV and other derivatives will never surpass Bitcoin's market value and mainstream applications. The short-term may affect price fluctuations, but the long-term bullish, Bitcoin fork will make Bitcoin stronger and allow more people to accept and use Bitcoin.

Look at the market cap of these forked coins such as Bitcoin Cash (BCH), Bitcoin SV (BSV) and Bitcoin Gold (BTG). Their combined market cap accounts for less than 3% of the Bitcoin market cap. So it would be wrong to say that the proliferance of these coins caused a reduction in the Bitcoin valuation. The most amount of damage was caused by altcoins (Ethereum, XRP, Dogecoin, Cardano, BNB.etc) and also by the stablecoins (USDT, PAX, USDC and BUSD). And in a way, the forked coins actually created good amount of profit for the Bitcoiners, as they were airdropped to those who were already holding BTC.

It is unlikely, there are about 2 or 3 forks already but the prices are still doing fine overall. Probably because forks exists as a different crypto and not as an additional supply to bitcoin plus it has to gain the faith of the people that it has a value unlike bitcoin that doesn't have to do it.

How Many Bitcoin Forks Are There? You will be surprised!!! (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5221882.0). If you check the long list of forks, you will discover that forks have very low value on the market, years after the fork time.

Altcoins can not take over the first position of Bitcoin. You can try to compare Ethereum or BNB with Bitcoin. Please take Ripple, Dogecoin and Cardano out of the comparison.

https://twitter.com/Excellion/status/1333966283876954113

If they ever had a chance to devalue Bitcoin in any significant way, that change is long gone. Bitcoin Cash probably was the biggest threat in terms of devaluing the real Bitcoin as there was a vibrant discussion around certain specifications. The interesting thing about forks is that you keep your economic interest in the network that has been forked as well. If you hold BTC and you are pro BCH, you still have your BTC after the fork. Very interesting considerations here.

I think Bitcoin Cash was a pretty big threat back when it was created and also because it had strong supporters. But all the rest were increasingly less influential. Overall, I don't think that it's like there's a fixed number of people and their investments, and that they either put everything in Bitcoin or diversify. Instead, there are more and more people investing more and more money in Bitcoin and in other currencies (spinoffs included, as I think we should simply treat them as we do any other altcoins), and I guess the background created by altcoins makes Bitcoin more popular that it would've been without them. So they're not a serious threat anymore, and they are not biting off chunks of potential investments that could go to Bitcoin. They create new demand, getting investments themselves but also boosting BTC's popularity.

I guess you're right. Bitcoin's more popular than ever with spinoffs in play. Bitcoin Cash offered "free money" to BTC holders, effectively increasing crypto/blockchain tech's mainstream adoption. Other forks came after Bitcoin Cash, but they're not as popular as the former project. People will get to choose from one cryptocurrency to another based on their current needs. I don't think spinoffs will devalue Bitcoin in the future, unless they do something that will literally "blow" people's minds.

A minor tweak like increasing the block size capacity is not enough to bring the masses into Bitcoin spinoffs. Considering that Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin SV, and other forks are simply variants of Bitcoin, it's very unlikely they'll replace the original project anytime soon. Instead of focusing into becoming the "original Bitcoin", competing projects should focus on working together to make our world a better place. With Bitcoin staying true to its "roots", I believe it will become much more valuable than what it is right now within the not-so-distant future. Just my thoughts ;D

it won't, in fact it won't have a big impact on bitcoin's development. because people think of copy coins only as altcoins, not as any other bitcoins. It looks like shitcoin, and I don't think it's worth the investment. the only bitcoin spinoff coin that looks good is just bitcoincash. but it's not even in the top 5 crypto coins.