Bitcoin Forum

Are hard forks the poor developer's ICO?

Two attempts since August to hard fork bitcoin, two more ahead of us. These developers just want lay claim to the best cryptocurrency and instead of creating it from scratch they feel they need to hijack bitcoin - why?

Developers who pursue hard forks really are trying to get something for nothing. And they give us something for nothing (in the airdrop) to try to get us to subscribe to their sheisty intentions.

Hard forks are great for Bitcoin, because the prove that Bitcoin is right and strong. But I don't see how anyone can have pride in supporting or developing a hard fork.

Can you?

I certainly do not believe so. There will be some hard forks that will be for the purpose of "money grabbing", but some will be fighting for their ideals. Bitcoin Cash, although I disagree with them, is a good example of a fork that has kept the belief in their values. I wish the same could be said of Bitcoin Gold.

Interesting point - what's an example of "belief in their values"? What are the values of Bitcoin Cash? What are the values of Bitcoin Gold? Or are you just equating "values" to "does the market it want it"?

Roger Ver, who is Bitcoin Cash's unofficial spokesman, believes that Bitcoin's transactions should remain onchain to uphold "Satoshi's vision". I did not take it seriously at first but if you take into account Blockstream's primary motive as a company, which is profit, then their interest in limiting blocks to 1MB is corrupted. To its followers, Bitcoin Cash is a "protest".

No comment on Bitcoin Gold. What values do they uphold?

Depends on how the fork is done. If you just do a hardfor, it's not an ICO, but if it is hardfork and then you hold it for some premine, then it is a shitcoin like ICO.

Block size upgrades, emergency difficulty adjustment and all the other so called 'improvements' from the core protocol are just pretexts to create a new token out of thin air, premine the shit out of it (like Bitcoin gold). Bitcoin has been around for almost a decade now and all the problems that it has encountered have been successfully solved by various means. These hard forks are just big time excuses and will be going nowhere in the future.

I don't really think so because these days even an ICO developer  does not needs much funds to start his own ICO. Infact people are selling services to create erc 20 tokens in just 0.1 btc. I think anyone in this crypyo world can surely invest such an amount in his own ICO. So wont say that forks are for poor developers.

yes it is true they try to compete with bitcoin but in fact bitcoin always remain the best and the first in the interest of the community, and we know BCC itself can not reduce the fame bitcoin, but in other part many people who gain by getting bitcoin for free , it's a lot of waiting waiting for many people.

It's obvious that they are trying to leverage the biggest cryptocurrency network to bootstrap their own. Bitcoin Cash definitely started a trend and I don't see it stopping anytime soon.

Old timers should appreciate the fact that noobs will be fleeced into buying "the next Bitcoin." Most people I've talked to, when they first entered this space, bought into altcoins because "Bitcoin was too expensive." This time around, we as BTC holders get to profit because people are buying into hard forks w/ airdrops instead of newly launched coins. It feels a little dirty taking peoples' money like that, but what are we supposed to do? :P

Well yeah you can call that especially btg which caused major panic among investors and huge exchange like bittrex also didn't list it but as they say you learn from your mistake looks like it has been solved finally and i hope in the future forks they atleast develop the basic functions to list it on a exchange

Thats an interesting point. Piggy-backing on an a "notable" cryptocurrency network gives hard-forkers an advantage in terms of existing users and brand awareness. But these are marketing reasons.

My question is, from a technology perspective, why do these projects need to fork the bitcoin blockchain and why dont they just start a new one, with their own consensus and other rules? What is the technological benefit in staying on / forking the bitcoin blockchain?

The way I see it is that everyone will naturally have different visions for how to move forwards, which means there will always be varying demand for different clients that only some participants on the network agree with.  Bitcoin isn't a democracy and there's no voting.  The only way to achieve a vision for Bitcoin that some don't agree with is to just go ahead and code it and see how much support it gets in the wild.  People seem to have this perverse idea that consensus means everyone has to agree all of the time, but that's not correct.  Consensus means the people who do agree will be naturally matched up and will build a blockchain together.  The alignment of incentives and network effects mean that the largest group of people who agree should naturally have the most successful chain (most economic activity, most proof of work, most widely accepted by payment processors, etc).

A poor developer's iCO.  ;D
What a cool way to say it or should I say it is too deep for other users here to understand.
I dont think that is the purpose for that.
This people who made it happen are bitcoin holders too so they have a good amount of money.
They aint poor, they just want more.
They milked the crypto world and created something just so they could get more money for what? What do we know, maybe they have bought it with bitcoin afterwards.

With ICO's developers create new coins and sell them for BTC or ETH, but with Bitcoin forks you have to own BTC to get forked coins, so it's not as profitable as running an ICO unless you are a whale.
However, forks are attempting to hijack Bitcoin's name and all their value is based around it, since they don't have any improvements besides a few changed lines of code that raise the limit of blocksize. So, it's quite easy to fork Bitcoin, but the hard part is promoting it - you have to spend much more than on promoting some ICO's, while ICO's are not much harder to launch - usually they don't have any prototypes, only whitepaper, ANN and site. Both forks and ICO's can be viewed as potential scams, so newbies should be very careful before deciding to send their BTC to someone promising them high returns or "the real Bitcoin".

Yes ICO creation might cost less nowadays but the chance of people buying from your ICO is not that high. but for hard forks what only need to do is hold as many bitcoin as you can and once the altcoin is created you can sell that coin right away with a higher value. Every advantage is on the part of the supporters of the fork since they are the one who owns most of bitcoins.

No, because people aren't obliged to pay in order to own the token.  The developers typically fund their own projects.
Note that the upcoming hard fork was agreed to occur before Bitcoin Cash or "Bitcoin Gold" were devised (or certainly before they had agreed for it to happen).  It's not their responsibility that other developers have attempted hard forks before them.

I also wouldn't consider it "hijacking" - just developing a different version of software that people can choose to run or not to run based on their own thoughts.
In this case, that was not their intention.  Notably there is not going to be a premine in this fork, so the developers are not at an advantage to an ordinary Bitcoin holder.

Nope they’re not even poor. Most of them are really hate bitcoin and to replace it is they’re biggest goal. Forking is an attention hungry way of dismantling bitcoin core and to have profit in the end for any result it maybe. Why does it is mostly supported by miners? Maybe in the old standards bitcoin can’t be mine now or harder not like before, if they do make a new mining coin with few miners in support what will happen. More coins means more profit less competitors. Now Forking means failure for me, the support of the community always be in bitcoin at least for now.

when a hard fork occurs,
this raises a very powerful force against bitcoin prices,
this is because the volume of bitcoin that grows very quickly,
because the fact is for anyone who holds some bitcoin when a hardfork happens this will make us have the same amount of coins for free

It's quite obvious that the Segwit2x wants to hijack the properties of Bitcoin by saying that they are upgrading it to a better version.
Instead of developing the coin together with the Segwit they decided to fork it by themselves. They also wanted the miners to support it.
Why would they do it if it was not for their benefit ? I am sure that they would not be successful in achieving their goals since Bitcoin will win the race and B2X will be just another Altcoin like the BCH and BTG.

Not all of them will be but bitcoin gold was definitely an attempt at an ICO launch using the fame of Bitcoin.

So all hard forks are "shitcoin like ICO" according to your logic, yes? There's a premine for every hard fork, that's how they have the quantity of coin to support the airdrop of the coins that have mined from the blockchain the hard fork is targeting for takeover.

I don't know...I have a mixed feeling for these hard forks developers.
One that, these Developers are making serious attempts to make some new improvisation in BTC with few new and unique features. On the other hand, it could be possible that some lazy developers making these forks just to encash the market cap and more no of user base without making much efforts.

Only the right time can tell the real intention of these fork developers.

That's not really what a premine is. Consider Bitcoin Cash: it was a live hard fork of the network at a specific fork block (no snapshot + premine like BTG). What Bitcoin Gold did is this: a) UTXO snapshot, b) premine period, c) public launch of mainnet. The BTG developers are literally privately mining the blockchain as we speak while the public is on the testnet. They were fairly open about it, too.

This is what a lot of altcoin developers do, too. They either silently mine a private blockchain that is later publicly launched, or they code a premine to their private keys into the source code.

You need a bit of influence to make a fork worth anything though, there is no way that you can have a bunch of people just decide that they want to hard fork Bitcoin and expect to make money off of it. The past forks have always had something going along with them, such as SegWit or the group of miners that wanted Bitcoin to be decentralized again, they had something going for them. If you just try to be a dev and make a hardfork off of Bitcoin, there will rarely be anything of value come out of it.

Bitcoin Gold didn't really have influential people or important ideas involved with it. Its backers are largely unknown besides perhaps Jack Liao, who ironically runs an ASIC mining operation. The whole "making mining decentralized" line is just a gimmick. But perhaps it's an effective one given the bad blood between Bitmain and some of the community.

In the end, I think the Bitcoin Gold people were just in the right place at the right time -- between Bitcoin Cash and Segwit2x. All they needed was a couple press releases, a good name/logo, and a boogeyman (Bitmain) and all of a sudden, people think BTG matters. Crypto is so silly sometimes.

It's a no-brainer for miners.  The math is pretty simple.  You currently have an average of roughly 2000 transactions per block with the current blocksize and each of those transactions pay a fee.  If you double that to a potential ~4000 transactions per block (or more as users increasingly begin to utilise SegWit), even if the users pay a slightly smaller transaction fee, miners have the potential to collect more fees overall.

Miners aren't supporting it because the 2x developers want them to, they're doing it because there's a potential financial incentive for them.

Many now seem to making the argument that 2x has "no real improvements" and "only a few lines of code being changed" but for those with money at stake and electricity bills to pay, clearly it's a significant improvement to them.  

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And for the thread as a whole, it's not just a question of what developers do.  Forks don't happen just because someone wrote some code.  People have to agree with what that code does.  Both miners and users need to see the benefit of the changes and choose to run it of their own free will if a fork is to be successful.  Which is why a fork can't be considered an attack.

• Devs and Miners can't make decisions unilaterally without Users unless they want to securing a chain with no transactions (some argue that's what could happen with 2x)
• Devs and users can't make a change unilaterally without miners (i.e. UASF) unless they want to be on a chain that no one is securing and it's problematic to transact on.
• Users and Miners can't make a unilateral change without Devs (which I don't think has been attempted yet, maybe look out for that fork next year, heh), as the code probably won't be stable and the network may be vulnerable to attack.

So unless all three come together in unison because they all see the benefit, it's likely that the fork attempt won't be successful.

If we see such hard forks,it would look like that some people want to make some quick cash by creating clone of bitcoin and then,pumping and dumping it.But there seems a hidden agenda within the two hard forks,BCH and segwit 2x.

Some group may probably be belonging to china decided to first hard fork bitcoin and create BCH.Then after few months,the decided to activate segwit 2x and even if the do not get enough support,they believed that it could devalue the brand Bitcoin which would be a great success for them.

Then their plan is to pump BCH within this period itself subsequently and later claim BCH as the true bitcoin.Proving this plan,we could see now that BCH is being pumped.

So,its clear that the want to devalue the brand bitcoin and claim BCH as the real bitcoin.

But BTG hard fork is entirely different from this and it is a totally unorganized project.It does not have such motto.They might  had an idea of making some quick cash by dumping BTG coins.          

Do you consider Roger Ver, BCH's Jihan Wu and Segwit2x poor developers than ICO coins? These 3 groups alone are top 10 if not top 5. Roger Ver and Jihan Wu need no introduction in crypto world. Segwit2x are miners, developers and stakeholders that signed the New York Agreement. NYA participants consist the largest chunk of Bitcoin miners.

I don't think these developers want to hijack BTC market. They are just trying to bring some new positive changes in BTC blockchain so that quick and best services can provided to its users. Users have a keen eye on upcoming Fork segwit2x, lets see how investor react to this forks. Hope it bring some positive and remarkable changes.

Different groups of people have different motto for doing hard forks.
Hard fork in august 1 was made by a group to create a clone of bitcoin BCH and they are continuously pumping it to make it stay alive.
Another group made such hard fork on october to create BTG coins.Its a totally unorganized project.
Now,segwit 2x activation is to be done by a large group of miners who had already signed NYA and either it may replace bitcoin or bitcoin segwit 2x coins would be created.It is said that they have an hidden agenda with BCH creators and they want to replace bitcoin with BCH.
Another hard fork is expected in december which is named as Bitcoin silver.

Maybe people who are behind those forks are the people who envy the original creator of bitcoin and the first adopters. Since the price of bitcoin is now high it will be better for them just to support a new coin and buy the generated coin at a lower price and make it popular after. Instead of doing their own ICO in which they still need to prove their coin's worth at the beginning on forks "bitcoin" is part of the new coin's name.

Lol well that's an interesting analogy. I guess they could be considered similar in a nutshell? I mean, the overwhelming majority of both are scams, both are basically exploited to make quick money, and very few people trust either of them.

What's sad is both could be used to create a better cryptocurrency landscape. Hard forks should be used to improve Bitcoin, not to take over decision making. ICOs should be used to fund legitimate companies that work on tokens, not pump and dump scams. It's interesting how two completely different concepts could be so strikingly similar though.

Technically, forks and ICOs are different. Bitcoin Gold was not a fork, because it incorporated a pre-mine. Bitcoin cash is the best example of a fork. Right now, I think people have figured out that adding 'Bitcoin ' to a coin's name boosts valuations. That is why you have all these variants.

ICO are well funded and even developers who actually do the forking. They can’t just advertised and getting the support from miners and Coinbase alike without assurance of profits of benefiting after. This is an example cooperation schemes that they actually doing for money than making the best options than bitcoin. Bitcoin cash doesn’t work will now, bitcoin Gold is nowhere to be found and this Segwit2x might have a chance but too little to even get the support 1/8 of the bitcoin community number..

Very much indeed. Hard forks can be done by any software developer with no experience at all. It's really nothing but a copy paste of a blockchain, and people should never believe developers who fork. If they are serious about their coin, they would have made a coin from scratch. It's a much better approach.

forks = scams

That's a little absolutist isn't it?  Such sweeping generalisations generally aren't conducive to keeping an open mind.  While a proposed fork can be suggested by a developer with little to no experience, that doesn't mean they all will be.  And no one should place complete trust in any developers, period.  People should judge everything on merit, purely on a case by case basis.  Don't trust human beings, or what they might say they'll do, look at what the code actually does.  It's entirely possible that there will one day be a dev team with a vision that isn't unanimous within the community, but still carries enough support to result in a change in consensus.

It's never as black and white as saying all forks are scams.  Some might be, but the possibility of a completely centralised development team who are in total control of every decision could result in unforeseen consequences, because it does involve placing blind trust and faith in the idea that those developers will always do what's best for Bitcoin.  But how can you be sure of that?  So just in case, at all times, users need to have a choice.  If there's no alternative, because there's only one choice of client, users would effectively be forced to run a client they may not necessarily agree with.  

Note that I'm not saying that every fork is great and we should jump on every bandwagon to do so.  Just that the option should be there if it's ever needed.  Think on that carefully before you dismiss the importance of freedom of choice in an open market.  



Again, developers don't make all the decisions unilaterally (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2356270.msg24063185#msg24063185).  They need both users and miners to support any changes.  That's why all this "takeover" talk is nonsense and this partisan rhetoric needs to stop now.  New users seem to be getting all the wrong ideas because of how people are framing this debate.  One single development team is not "in control" of Bitcoin, ergo, there is no one to "take over" from.  

I have no idea why people would even wish to see Bitcoin in their heads as some kind of centralised dictatorship, so it boggles the mind as to why they talk about it as if it already were.  Devs don't impose changes on the users.  It never has worked like that, it never will work like that.  Stop talking as though it matters whose code we're running.  It doesn't give them any special power, privilege or authority over the network.  If there is ever a change in consensus, it doesn't mean one dev team has been replaced by another.  That's all stupid crap spouted by stupid people.  I'm tired of hearing it.  Please stop.

Is there anyone who has really kept the forked crypto and didn't sell it for BTC right after it was claimable?