Well, difficulty has now dropped significantly on the Bcash chain, so we should start to see some stability: https://twitter.com/jimmysong/status/892969785532850176

Blocks are definitely being mined faster now. Still no blocks for 1.5 hours at the moment, though. It seems this whole debacle will play out in slow motion...

It was run on a .ru domain years ago, and I believe the exchange was based in Russia at that time. It was banned by the Russian government, and supposedly the exchange moved operations to Bulgaria and/or Cyprus. The .com domain was eventually also banned by Russia, so they mostly use the .nz domain. That domain has yet to be seized.

I didn't verify for myself, but I saw someone post earlier that btc-e.top was showing a mirror of the old site. They said the domain was registered to the same company as btc-e.nz .... VERY interesting if so. Apparently btc-e.top was also redirecting to Exmo (a Russian exchange with alleged ties to BTC-e). I wish I could find that thread now....

IIRC, the DOJ straight up called BTC-e users criminals in the press release. From the indictment, they even try to project criminality on users based on their trollbox usernames and commentary. When it comes to civil forfeiture, the burden is on the accused to prove the money is clean. That's very difficult to prove if you've ever sent coins into the exchange. Someone mentioned Libertyreserve... in that case, there was no repayment to users.

It's a mystery regarding how much USD, EUR and crypto they could get their hands on. I heard that the exchange never kept bank accounts in its name. Mayzus/Moneypolo/Okpay moved the money, BTC-e had third party accounts, and supposedly kept their fiat money in shell companies several degrees removed. As for crypto, one would hope that the keys would be encrypted on any seized server, and that cold storage would be out of reach.

Exactly. With new implementations and wallets popping up left and right, and confused users just looking for a way to get their Bcash and dump it, the situation is ripe for fake wallets and phishing websites. This is one of the reasons why I haven't made any effort to get the airdropped coins. I really don't know which wallets are safe, and I have no idea who these BitcoinABC/Bitcoin Cash developers are. Best to wait for now.

Transactions are stable at this point. But if you are trying to interact with the Bcash fork, there are definitely some dangers. Since people are looking for a new wallet to split their Bcash and dump it, there's definitely going to be some folks that fall for fake wallets.

I wouldn't trust the Electron wallet, or any of the Bcash wallets until you have thoroughly analyzed the code (if not, at least have someone you trust verify safety first). It's not worth interacting with this fork until you are sure your bitcoins are safe.

I will have some Bcash from Bitfinex and Kraken, but I'm not doing anything with my local or cold storage wallets. I don't trust the Electron Cash or Bitcoin ABC wallets.... I'd rather wait until I'm confident that I have a secure way to split my coins. There is temptation to rush because of the current price of Bcash, but that price can't last in the short term, once supply starts to arrive at exchanges.

Long term, who knows. Alts usually get pumped at some point.

When you say "successful" what do you mean, exactly? That the ICO raised a lot of money? That the marketing pitch sounds really great, and you think the developers will build a great product someday?


When you say that they solve Bitcoin's problems, they have not been tested at scale. Time will tell. Bitcoin is being built to be robust, and that's why it performs so well today, whether there is network congestion or not.

Beyond that, the problem is that big money tends to flow towards more stable assets, even within the risky world of cryptocurrency. Naturally, that means Bitcoin. Also, regardless of what features are coded into various altcoins today, most if not all of those features can be integrated into Bitcoin (at least via drivechains, sidechains, etc). Bitcoin moves slower: that's a feature, not a bug.

Easy does it. There's gonna be a lot of pushback against a hard fork, especially one so rushed as three months. I think even if we were talking about a hard fork 12 months out, you'd have significant opposition from most Core devs. If bitcoin businesses and miners follow through and push an 8x hard fork in November, there will definitely be a split. Unfortunately, the businesses have lots of money backing them, and lots of money to spend. Either way, things will be interesting. Don't expect it to go smoothly.

Yes. Since you control the private keys on a blockchain.info wallet, you can extract the private keys and import them into a Bcash-compatible wallet. One such wallet is Bitcoin ABC (bitcoinabc.org/). There is another that was called Electrum Cash, but I think they may have changed the name, since they were infringing on Electrum's trademark.

The network is still quite slow, since difficulty hasn't adjusted and the hash rate is comparatively low vs. the original chain.

Indeed, this is backed by all the corporate elements in Bitcoin (as well as miners). Businesses act for their users, so if they unite behind a hard fork along with miners, they could probably take a lot of the economy with them. I imagine they collectively have a lot of money to market their plans to the public as well.

I guess now that we are over the BIP148 hurdle, we have three months of arguing and FUD heading into the proposed November hard fork.

I wouldn't say the fork saga is finished. The split has happened, but the dust hasn't settled. The markets are still extremely illiquid (the major exchanges like Bitfinex still don't have markets up), and BCH block intervals are very long for now, until difficulty readjustment. In time, things could get a bit more interesting. I don't think BCH has much chance to overtake Bitcoin, but we could see some "network split" effects on the market, and there could still be some turbulence.

My take on the market consensus is that most people thought (and still think) that Segwit lock-in and post-August 1 = time for moon. Time will tell; I've got an open mind.

Indeed, I don't see any reason to dump BCH off the bat. Like any other alt, it will probably have its day in the sun.

I don't think it has great fundamentals, though. In general, I'm opposed to hard forks and would prefer to see more scalable solutions than increasing the block size. If BCH can take the XT-Classic-Unlimited-r/btc contingent of the community, though, I think that would be a worthwhile split. It's best if communities with antithetical positions split up in the long term.

In the short term (weeks, months) it's really difficult to say what will happen to BCH on the market. The DAO split in Ethereum might provide some clues...

That's the most sensible stance. There were a couple troubling things in the statement. They should know exactly what was seized and what was not. They shouldn't need to slow roll over the course of the next week or two. They should know which bank accounts are frozen, and they should know what servers (therefore wallets) were seized. One would hope that any servers within reach of the FBI would only have customer/hot wallets, with keys encrypted. But with these 66k BTC transfers floating around, who knows....

Congestion is low and fees are cheap right now. Pay a high fee (currently > 60 sat/byte) and you are very likely to be fine. However, there is always the very small chance that a block won't be found for a couple hours, and even a high fee paid at this time could get priced out.

If it's not vital to make the transfer, I'd probably avoid it. But chances are, you'll be fine with many blocks to spare.

There wasn't really a panic selling wave, though. On the contrary, the market has been steadily climbing for 2 weeks now. Now, we are only a few hours away from the Bitcoin Cash fork, so things could get a bit more turbulent. I've got my popcorn ready.

Only on ViaBTC and maybe a couple of other small Chinese exchanges. These are very illiquid futures markets, and easily manipulated. I wouldn't put too much weight on the current prices.

After the fork, if/when we see markets open on the major exchanges like Bitfinex, things could get interesting. Everyone expects everyone else to dump their BCC. If it's anything like the ETH/ETC debacle, it won't turn out as everyone expects.

That's the consensus. But the consensus (in markets) is usually wrong. I.e. When everyone thinks the price is going to moon, it usually drops. This is why the commitment of traders (e.g. BTCUSD sentiment on BFXdata) is commonly used as an indicator by traders. It's important to know when the market is heavily weighted towards one position--that side will often get squeezed.

I don't think BCC is useful as an altcoin, but that doesn't mean it will be worthless. Speculators gonna speculate.

Miners have largely kept their options open regarding explicit plans to mine the Bitcoin Cash chain. Naturally, it makes sense for miners to watch market reaction on the exchanges before taking the risk of pointing much hash power at BCC. Given all of Jihan Wu's past rhetoric, though, I imagine Bitmain will allocate some portion of its hash power to BCC. This could potentially create a feedback loop which supports the BCC price and causes other miners to defect.

I certainly don't see BCC overtaking BTC, but I'm not as confident as most people are that it will be worthless and irrelevant. If nothing else, as the OP points out, it will be nice to see the potential flaws of big blocks and dynamic block size front and center.

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but a change.org petition isn't going to do anything. There is a pretty negligible chance that BTC-e could relaunch in some capacity and people might be able to get some portion of funds out, but that's pretty unlikely given all the heat on them from the FBI, etc. I'd love to see them back in business, but operating in a cat-and-mouse game with the Feds? They'd need balls of steel to come back under that kind of heat.