Actually, no one major company has left the agreement. F2pool is still signalling in support of Segwit2x, so it's not clear what their intentions are. I believe the only signatories who left were Wayniloans, SURBTC, and Bitwala. I'm not familiar with any of them after being around in this space for 4 years. Xapo and Blockchain recently reaffirmed their intention to support 2X as "Bitcoin/BTC" if miners follow through.


If private keys in that wallet contain BTC, then they will contain both coins after the fork, yes. But the opt-in replay protection in BTC1 was removed, so the only safe thing to do is not transact at all around/after the fork. Hopefully a form of replay protection will be added to the fork so that it's safe and easy to split the coins and send them to different wallets.

Yeah, people just look to the last similar situation and assume the same results with no regard for market cycles or other fundamental factors. Last time around, I don't think Bitcoin Cash had much effect on the market. The BIP91 signalling and lock-in ended market uncertainty around the potential BIP148/UASF chain split, and the market rallied accordingly. Bitcoin Cash just rode the coattails of that rally.

So in that sense, I don't think Bitcoin Cash serves as precedent at all. It could go either way. All I know is that Bitcoin Gold doesn't have nearly the support from big companies/personalities that Bitcoin Cash had (Bitmain, Bitpay, Roger Ver, John McAfee). And they also don't have a working wallet yet, nor have exchanges said a word about it. So I suspect Bitcoin Gold will be much, much smaller than BCH.

It has the feel of a MLM scheme. They even have referral links built into the signatures, bounties, etc.

Maybe not technically a scam, but very close to one. Certainly, the premine/staking the premine is exploiting very naive fools, and/or involving people who are desperate enough to advertise Deep Onion knowing how unethical the distribution is.


$200/month doesn't even mean anything when 90% of your funds are locked up in a coin that is quietly descending to zero. Indeed the participants will repeat that it's not a scam because they are getting paid to spam about Deep Onion. But who's getting scammed? The investors, of course!

It's definitely not glamorous or fast, that's for sure. That's the tradeoff with decentralized exchanges, and why most people don't bother with things like Etherdelta. Centralized exchanges can have much thicker order books, lightning fast trading engines, and placing orders on the book doesn't require a blockchain transaction. Etherdelta is definitely not for beginners.

But it does feel good to be able to trade without trusting my funds to an exchange. I was crippled pretty badly by both Bitfinex (2016) and BTC-e (2017), so I'm not overexposing myself to any centralized exchange.

I'm partial to the idea that miners are part of the community, and I think that some of the major miners (like Bitfury, F2Pool) are fairly in touch with the userbase and are apparently concerned about what they want. I don't feel the same sense of community from miners like Bitmain. Jihan Wu spends his time/energy attacking Core and pumping Bitcoin Cash -- the next batch of miners is only payable in Bitcoin Cash. What's that about?

Buying mining equipment is supposed to be a way to invest in BTC while supporting the network; it shouldn't be an avenue to get people to prop up the BCH price for Bitmain.

Ah, I think you've been around the block a few times. People in this space are by and large fairly clueless. That's the thing about the S curve; most people in the space are much closer to being noobs than experts. I saw a statistic today (on Kyle Torpey's Twitter) -- something like 40% of on-chain transactions on the network use Blockchain.info's service.

So, seeing their statement today (which basically copy/pasted Xapo's) was a bit unnerving. They can "passively harvest" their entire userbase to this fork if the miners switch chains, much like Ethereum did in the DAO hard fork. In that case, all the major wallets hard forked by default.

If I wrap my tin foil hat on tight enough, this could even be a grand conspiracy to centralize Bitcoin, backed by governments and central banks. If I were a government worried about cryptocurrencies threatening national monetary sovereignty, I would back efforts to centralize Bitcoin.

Bitcoin users -- much like consumers in a corporate-controlled world -- would begin to sacrifice trust to the most powerful companies (including mining outfits) if the hard fork is successful. That would set a useful precedent for governments who want more influence over Bitcoin (and by extension, all cryptocurrencies).

Honestly, I think this is being done intentionally. Based on their original plans (pre-mine after the fork and offer the pre-mine as ICO), I actually thought the fork may occur well before October 25th so they could pre-mine.

Now it looks like the fork will occur on October 25th, but they will delay the release of the source code/wallet. This gives them time to mine before anyone starts pointing hash rate at their coin. Pure speculation, but that's what I think for now.

Thanks for being so transparent about this. As a an E-LITE holder, I'd love for you to run some bounties with the undistributed tokens -- both social media/signature campaign bounties and developer bounties. I'm looking forward to seeing where this project goes.


Do they take Etherdelta into account on CoinMarketCap? Or only the centralized exchanges?

In my experience, depositing tokens into the Etherdelta smart contract can take a while (10-30 minutes) because these transactions are sent with a very low fee. Fortunately, that saves you money. This is the nature of decentralized exchange; you're using the blockchain, which isn't all that efficient. But you can remove trusted third parties this way.

There is still some security risk due to MITM attacks via browser, but it's a big improvement from the exit scam / hack risk of centralized exchanges.

Well, it's purely for token trading, right? Most tokens are highly speculative, if not outright scams. I like Etherdelta a lot for what it is -- in-browser (simple, easy) decentralized exchange. The problem with security is that, much like Blockchain.info, you don't control the software that is pushing transactions. So if the service is compromised, you could be subject to MITM attacks, even if the site doesn't control your private keys. All in all, though, it's safer than a centralized exchange. Just don't transact with huge amounts of money there.

I figured it was because people were posting their ETH addresses in the thread (not because the dev was breaking rules). Giveaways have been banned for a long time in the altcoin forums, so I assumed it had to do with that. Airdrops seemed like a clever way around that. Are airdrops banned now too?

Looks like there was less than 1500 people, too, looking at the contract address. There were probably some duplicates in there. The supply is quite low, too, so if the project can gain some momentum then those lucky enough to get in the airdrop may make a good deal of profit. Time will tell.

While I agree that there is only one Bitcoin at all times, I disagree with your argument. You can't know until long after the fork which chain has majority support. Hash power could switch back and forth. It could be difficult to gauge which network has majority user support, especially if we consider the position of SPV and web wallet users. And why should a simple majority be good enough?

I think any incompatible change of the consensus rules -- which necessarily causes an incompatible chain split -- creates an altcoin. There's nothing wrong with creating altcoins, but we should be honest about it. The legacy chain is Bitcoin. Litecoin is a hard fork of Bitcoin, too. Why would we call it "Bitcoin?"

I wouldn't say it's obvious. They are just signalling intent more than a month away. Even F2Pool is still signalling for the NYA, even though they have said they are backing out. The futures market is also pricing the legacy chain at 3:1 to the fork. That also suggests that things may not be so clear cut.

On the other hand, I don't think that speculators are properly pricing in the market effect if, say, 90% of miners follow through and switch networks. The legacy chain could still win out in the end in that situation, but it could be a rough road until the first difficulty retarget is reached -- long block time, very high fees, and the psychological effect of being the weaker chain.


But the community, and prospective investors, could split. This could certainly be damaging to Bitcoin's network value. Nothing to write obituaries over, but still...

"Limited liability" just limits personal liability for company debts, as in bankruptcy proceedings. It doesn't give LLCs free license to steal customer money, or absolve them of criminal wrongdoing, or remove affiliation to connected entities (through ownership, debt, etc) in the eyes of the law.

I'm not surprised, though. They gave US customers an opportunity to cut and run before the launch of WEX last month. The 55% refund felt to me like a signal to people incapable of verifying: get out now.

Xapo has made an announcement regarding their Segwit2x policy: https://blog.xapo.com/about-the-bitcoin-segwit2x-update/

Basically, they will call the chain with most accumulated difficulty "bitcoin / BTC". The minority hashrate chain will be called  "BC1" if it has a 1MB consensus rule and "BC2" if it has a 2MB consensus rule. The minority chain will be available for withdrawal and conversion but they will not offer long term support for it.

So they are basically just following the miners here. Thoughts?

There is no news about that yet. I don't think any exchange will make an announcement about it until the code is public. If there is no replay protection, I don't think any exchanges will add it -- it just wouldn't be safe regarding exchanges' custodial obligations.

The developers mentioned that they expect the coin to be added to exchanges in early November. It sounds to me like we can expect them to add replay protection, but that the code won't be released until near the launch date.

Regarding the November Segwit2x fork, Coinbase and Bitfinex will support both chains. Bitflyer has signed onto the NYA. I don't think other exchanges have said anything yet.

It's too early to say. For now, we cannot see the code. There may or may not be replay protection, and that makes a huge difference. With strong replay protection, you can just first move your BTC to fresh addresses (the altcoin will not move because the BTC transactions are invalid to its blockchain). Then you can empty those private keys into the altcoin wallet. If it's a scam to steal your private keys, then you won't lose BTC this way.

If there is not replay protection, it is a lot more tricky. But I think they'll need to add it, otherwise exchanges won't want to add their coin.

It depends on hashrate. I hate to say it, as miners colluding to leave the original network feels coercive -- it deprives users of a vital good/service (transaction confirmations). So if, say, 90% of the miners indeed follow through with the NYA, I worry that many users will switch to the stronger chain just because they are scared to be on the minority chain or frustrated by high fees/lack of confirmations.

SPV wallets are a big issue right now with the lack of replay protection. That may change; it's apparently an open pull request right now on the BTC1 repo. I really think there are too many unknowns right now to make a good prediction.

How do you know that this "upgrade" is essential? How do you gauge whether it's really an upgrade, or if it will actually degrade the network? If it ends up significantly splitting the network, I don't see how it could possibly be an upgrade.


Don't you see the disconnect in your logic here? You can't support only the original Bitcoin but also support Segwit2x. Bitcoin Gold and Segwit2x have a lot more in common than Bitcoin has with either of them.