Older versions of Electrum (prior to version 2.9) follow the chain that their server follows. People can run Electrum servers on either fork. I think most people randomly choose servers, and those that do so are at the mercy of the server they connect to.


Electrum (version 2.9 and higher) is able to detect consensus failures between servers. It lets users select the branch they prefer. I don't think this has ever been used on the mainnet before, so hopefully it works correctly as tested when the time comes.

The bigger issue is that a contentious fork won't include replay protection. So it's not enough just to choose which branch to follow -- that can result in losing coins on the other chain. Many users will want to split their coins.

While BTC is quickly moving upwards, I generally hold BTC and scale out of altcoins. When the price of BTC starts consolidating (sideways, triangle patterns, etc), I tend to scale back into altcoins.

The thinking here is that people chasing the BTC rally are dumping their altcoins. Once the volatility dies down, they start looking for instruments (like altcoins and tokens) that move faster.


I'm looking at anything which hasn't pumped yet. For large cap coins, ETH and ZEC look like they are consolidating for an explosion upwards sometime in the coming weeks. For lower caps, I like BTX (Bitcore) and BSD (Bitsend).

Last I heard, btc1 nodes are stuck as of block height 494,782. According to Core developer Alex Morcos, everyone saying that the forking height was 494,784 was incorrect. Apparently, the last common block is 494,782 and 494,783 is supposed to be the first forked block. That assumes that miners actually mine a block. Given that the difficulty was not adjusted downward, this seems unlikely.


Unless miners become irrational and start mining 2x, it should be a non-event. The difficulty is quite high, so mining it is probably just burning money. I'm really surprised that Coinbase bothered with this after all the other companies (including Bitmain) backed out.

Is there a way to check the security log going back further than one month? When I go to https://bitcointalk.org/seclog.php It only returns results going back to October 18th. Thanks!

Segwit2x was "cancelled" by its biggest proponents, but it'll still be interesting to see what happens at Block height 484,784. For one thing, the forking client is already released in the wild and has been for some time. So the fork will occur, the question is, will anyone notice? Will any miners mine a block on the fork? I'm curious to see if Jihan Wu plays games with the hash rate in order to foment a split between BTC and B2X. That seems like a really risky gamble for Bitmain, though.


My expectations are incredibly low. The parameters look exactly like Bitcoin Gold, which was similarly disappointing. At least Bitcoin Silver will take us one step closer towards the death of all these crappy forks.

Bitcoin isn't having trouble at all. People are shrugging off the mempool congestion and Bitcoin Cash FUD, and we just saw a new all-time high in price. But fortunately for LTC, we got some really bullish news today. Lightning developers have been working on using the Lightning Network to make cross-chain atomic swaps between Bitcoin and Litecoin. The first such transaction was completed successfully today!

The market reacted to the news, instantly pumping the price from $64 to $74. It's a great day to be an LTC holder!

See here for more info:
https://twitter.com/lightning/status/931277111490265088
https://twitter.com/BitcoinMagazine/status/931298020204924928

I guess you're hoping for a double top?

After breaking to new highs and therefore running stops on short positions, it makes sense to see some sell pressure. There are always traders anticipating a double top, so this setup usually makes for a decent intraday trade. However, I suspect that we won't drop below the resistance in the $7500s which should now become support. I think this will be a short consolidation before another face-melting rally.

I really think $10k is on the menu soon.

I think that historically, this has been true. Altcoins today generally fall under two categories: forks of Bitcoin and forks of Ethereum. And since both of these are POW blockchains, the underlying incentive mechanisms that make their economies work and promote the network effect are pretty similar.

This might change over the next few years. While I think IOTA is centralized and unreliable, it's "tangle" consensus mechanism is the first glimpse into a new kind of consensus network with different incentives for security.

Hashgraph, too will be a new kind of consensus algorithm built to compete with Bitcoin. Bram Cohen (of Bittorent) is also creating something called the Chia network which will completely swap the POW security model for something called "proof-of-time." It seems we are leaving the era of Bitcoin clones, and into a new era of real potential competitors that offer something innovative and different.

There are multiple reasons, but none of them guarantee that Bitcoin will remain the most valuable cryptocurrency forever.

First off, BTC has the first mover advantage. As the first cryptocurrency, it is the most recognizable and widely trusted "brand" of this new asset class, so it naturally receives the most investment.

Secondly, Bitcoin Core possesses the most prolific developers in the space. While much of the theoretical work and innovation that has gone into some top altcoins is impressive, none can claim credit for creating a system so robust as Bitcoin.

Thirdly, the network effect. Per Metcalfe's law, the network value is proportional to the square of the number of connected users of the system. As more users come online, the network continues to increase exponentially in value. Another cryptocurrency could grow its network at a faster rate, but this hasn't happened yet.

You bought into the hype. That usually ends in tears. Part of the reason that the price has dumped is that the launch was rocky and the fundamentals aren't great. The coin doesn't have much going for it besides potentially tapping part of BTC's network and using its name.

The other thing is that BTC has turned bullish in the last several days, and it's already approaching the all-time highs again. Under these conditions, it seems the forks (Bitcoin Gold and Bitcoin Cash) suffer. There seems to be a negative correlation right now.

There are a couple things people should consider in this thread. Firstly, Bitmex will be liquidating all of their customers' BCH holdings by year-end and distributing BTC to them. Bitmex is the highest volume broker/swap provider on the market.

Secondly, Coinbase will be distributing their customers' BCH holdings by January 2018. They supposedly hold ~10% of all BTC in circulation, so that applies to BCH as well. It's not clear whether they will open BCH markets. If they don't, I think we can assume that customers will send their BCH to Bitstamp, Bitfinex, etc. to dump.

Regardless of anything else, these seem like bearish fundamentals to me. I think that Bitcoin Cash whales will be selling into any price pump before all of this new supply enters the market.

The hash rate can only give us limited information. We can take a broad overview regarding these trends --- whether miners are investing in Bitcoin or pointing their hash rate at other coins, or shutting down entirely. But we can't know what kind of R&D into chip fabrication is happening behind the scenes. And we also don't know how much hardware is waiting in lie for the next difficulty adjustment.

It's also important to note Bitmain's dominant position in the chip fabrication industry. They control a lot of the hash rate and they also dominate much of the ASIC hardware sector. They can manipulate our perceptions around the hash rate.


I disagree. Bcash isn't worth investing in, IMO. But there are many other interesting coins that have bright futures.

Wow, that is very shady. It looks like they got overrun by profitable trades during the Bitcoin Cash rally over the past couple days. As a bucket shop, they weren't able to repair their own position and feared that the market would continue rallying. As such, they cancelled all trades and aren't paying out any of the profits people made.

I've suspected for years that SimpleFX is a bucket shop that bets against its traders rather than hedging its traders' positions on the market like a real broker. This further confirms my suspicions.

Stay away from this place!

You have to admit, though.... it's pretty weird for the #2 coin to trade like a pump-and-dump. This isn't like the days of Cryptsy. It took an incredible amount of money to pump Bitcoin Cash to those levels. I'm honestly still in awe, and I wonder if it can continue.

After seeing the value of Bitcoin Cash drop in half in ~ 30 minutes last night, I figured it was over. Rising too quickly like that usually means no recovery for a very long time. But I'll admit that it's scary to watch this sort of manipulation. And it doesn't bode well for the approval of ETF's either, IMO.

It'll be interesting to see if some subset of miners ends up mining the 2x chain, further drawing hashrate away from BTC (as the bitcoin2x.org site states). That seems unlikely, but Bitmain is certainly capable of playing games with the hash distribution. A lot of people shrug it off, but I think the recent spam attacks with sustained high fees are having some effect on investors.

Anyway, I'm selling my BCH into this rise..... just sold at $1040-1050. The chart looks really healthy, but there was massive volume today. I'm expecting a correction (which would coincide with a healthy bounce in BTC).

Exactly. I'm surprised people are bothering to speculate about this website at all. I could throw a meaningless site like that up in 30 minutes. It's clearly just a ploy to sow more confusion and anger with regard to the current network congestion (spam attacks) that conveniently coincide with the cancelled fork. Enter: Bitcoin Cash.

I suspect this may have been the plan all along: use Bitcoin's difficulty algorithm against us and starve us of hash rate, which coerces users into adopting Bitcoin Cash. It's pretty brilliant. Cobra (Core dev) is even talking about changing the POW algo soon. The FUD never ends!

It's not surprising at all. Bech32 format was only implemented very recently; it should be expected that there will be a significant period of time where the ecosystem is in transition. For all I know they haven't even implemented Segwit yet on their end.

You can always use a P2SH nested Segwit address to receive withdrawals from them in the meantime. It would be nice to have a hybrid wallet with both standard and Bech32 addresses for situations like this. This is the main reason why I haven't upgraded to a Segwit wallet. Not many people/businesses are interacting with Bech32 addresses at this point.

I was worried this might happen. The cancellation of Segwit2x and the massive spam attacks on the Bitcoin chain right now created the perfect conditions to pump Bitcoin Cash. It was masterful, really. And Bitcoin Gold also benefitted. I guess the market saw it this way: No free B2X dividend, so that value leaves BTC and gets invested into BCH and BTG.

Naturally, with all the hype around the Bitcoin forks, alts are suffering. To be honest, though, I'm glad. I wasn't able to accumulate much on the last leg down, so this gives me another opportunity to buy the dumps.

I missed out on eBTC, but fortunately, I managed to make almost $1000 on the ELITE (Ethereum Lite) airdrop. The thing about these projects is that you need to assume they are cash grabs by the anonymous devs. They'll type up a vague whitepaper and make an ambitious roadmap, which are used to goad investors into buying the airdropped supply.

Most airdrops these days are just ERC20 tokens; they are literally just copy/pasted overnight. Whatever you do, take the free airdrop, but if you miss out, don't buy in. 99% of them are pump-and-dumps.

Well, we had a pretty clear blow-off top at $7900 on very high volume. Based on that alone, I'd expect a sizeable correction to occur. Past corrections in this year's rally have been in the 30-40% range, meaning we could see prices ~ $5000. That also fits with the overall parabolic structure (assuming the corrections continue becoming shorter by time). Below $4900 and I would worry that the rally is done and we could see a prolonged bear market.

Everything is down except Bitcoin Cash, which basically saved my portfolio today. Thanks, Roger and Jihan!