It was always doable. It happened before. This time it happened during the scaling drama, so it got a lot of attention, even mainstream media were publishing sensationalist articles like "Bitcoin split in two, future uncertain".


No, it's the nature of blockchain and open-source projects.


In the long run - they are irrelevant, unless they somehow deliver better network than Bitcoin - but I don't see it happening in the near future (2-5 years).
Short-term effects of forks may vary from near-zero to somewhat distracting.

Because Bitcoin's price (in USD) goes up or down only when it's bought/sold for fiat. When BTC is exchanged for altcoin, or altcoin exchanged for USD, it has no direct impact on BTC price. It might influence traders to buy or sell BTC, but they can also ignore alts when they are making their decisions on BTC/USD markets.
BTC price would drop if people were selling BTC for fiat and using that fiat to buy BCH, but this is not the case because people can trade BCH/BTC directly, and this is actually the highest volume in all BCH trading pairs.

10 billion dollar network emerged out of thin air. Or did it?

Marketcap is a simple multiplication of price of a single coin by total number of coins in economy. It implies that there's a free market where every participant can easily sell or buy given coin.

But is it the case with today's BCH? As of now, almost no exchange actually supports BCH deposits, so the real amount of BCH in circulation is far smaller than 21 million, it's actually equal to amount of BTC held by users on exchanges that listed BCH now. This number is probably some dozens of thousands BCH, at it creates a perfect opportunity for speculation and manipulation.

Businesses don't make decisions to accept new coin basing on it's 24h price change, or position on coinmarketcap. What they do care is genuine support from users, and so far no one talks how they want to use BCH instead of Bitcoin, in fact most people can't wait to dump it, but they can't because exchanges haven't launched their wallets yet (hence the artificial shortage and price rise).


Supporting BCH is a big security concern, coins need to be moved from Bitcoin wallets before importing private keys, BCH software hasn't been tested and reviewed, it's unclear if there's a demand for it from users. This is why most casinos haven't supported it and only promised to release coins at most. Supporting BCH is profitable only for exchanges right now, since they are getting fees from trades.

Governments can't destroy cryptocurrencies in one swing, like it happened with private payment systems previously, but if major forces (the US, EU, China, Russia) would act together, they can make sure that cryptocurrencies adoption will never reach mainstream levels. The weakest link of cryptocurrencies is mining - if cryptocurrencies were completely outlawed globally, most large scale mines would be forced to close, meaning lower network hashrates, meaning it would be easier for governments to attack crypto networks with 51% attacks. But there are many reasons why it hasn't happened yet and unlikely to happen in the future.

This price doesn't mean anything now, because most exchanges still haven't enabled their BCH wallets, so only people who held BTC on those exchanges and got BCH credited to their accounts can sell. Basically, it's not open market yet.
As for who buying - the answer is speculators, crypto markets are well knows for their volatility, so bubbles, pumps and dumps are nothing new. Rememeber, shitcoins rise and fall, Bitcoin is here to stay.

All these robbery arguments are stupid, Coinbase guarantees storing of Bitcoins, it never says in its user agreement that you own private keys and any altcoin that will fork from Bitcoin. And they have made a warning that anyone who wants to get BCH should withdraw, if someone has ignored this warning, it's their own fault.
And the reason why Coinbase and other companies don't touch BCH is because they don't want to run untested, unverified software from unknown developers. Their primary concern is safety of Bitcoins they currently hold. It would be "robbery" if they have claimed BCH for themselves, so if you want to make this kind of accusations, go find transactions on BCH blockchain that would prove that.

Words like "rival factions" or "civil war" imply that there's some significant split in Bitcoin community, but in reality a big amount of users who spread FUD against Bitcoin while promoting BCH are actually just shills with bought/fresh accounts. And when it the time comes to show your real support economically via buying and mining, it becomes clear that BCH has very little support.

No one can afford 1-2 dollar fee for every transaction while using it in place of cash/credit cards.


This will be the issue for a long time, if people will start actually adopting Bitcoin, it will be the same or even bigger than the recent spam attack, in terms of load on the network. And segwit itself hasn't solved the scaling problem (and its goal never was to do so), it's a preparation for future developments.

Basically, blockchain technology is still on its early stages of development.

Mining is a business, and right now redirecting your hash power to BCH is a loss, because the difficulty is huge while the reward is small. When BCH difficulty will drop, some hashpower/BCH_price equilibrium will be established. So, it doesn't mean that BCH is already dead, but still it's funny how miners, who were crying for big blocks, are refusing to switch to Bitmaincoin, because they have no confidence in its price. Hope it will be a lesson for everyone who didn't realize that Bitcoin's direction is decided by economic majority and not some pure hashrate.

People don't "want" Bcash to become a shitcoin, people are making their predictions about the potential value of bcash network. So far it's not looking good, because there's no innovation. It's just another copypaste of Bitcoin, something that anyone can do without any in-depth technical knowledge. 8 mb blocksize isn't innovative, there are lots of coins (including Bitcoin forks) with similar or bigger blocksize. People around BCH constantly attack BTC, its community and devs, while not actually adding anything to crypto community, so it's only natural that most people have negative opinions about BCH.

In the long run it doesn't matter who Satoshi is and what is actually his vision (big blocks or offchain transactions or whatever). What truly matters is how good a given network is - we have open competition between Bitcoin, its forks and altcoins, and so far Bitcoin Core is winning by providing the best software. So, even if Satoshi supports big blocks, but it will turn out that big blocks can't scale to dozens and hundreds of thousands tps, while other scaling solutions can, it would mean that the latter networks will be worth more.

The difference between altcoins that use BTC addresses for airdrop and BCH/BCC is that BCH/BCC copies Bitcoins blockchain and uses it as its own. To claim BCC you need to import your private keys (which might endanger your BTC wallet in the future), while in altcoin airdrop you need to sign a message with BTC address. This is because BCC/BCH code is very close to Bitcoin, while other altcoins can have major differences.
So, BCC/BCH is an airdrop altcoin, but a bit different from other altcoins. For example, you can claim it anytime you want after the fork, while other airdrop altcoins have centralized distribution which is active only during some time frames.


There's no hype for it, so far only some exchanges accept it. As for 51% attack - just as the other altcoins. No one is going to bother attacking them.

Once you import your private keys to BCC client, nothing happens with your BTC, they are on different chains. Technically, there's a risk that BCC will use your private keys to steal your BTC, but it can be easily avoided by moving BTC to new wallet before importing private keys. So, you got everything wrong (or deliberately trolling). Google what replay protection is.


BCC is an airdrop, there's less incentive to hodl it for primary owners (BTC users), since they got it for free, without investing anything. The price support of BCC will be formed by big block believers and people like Jihan and Ver.

https://www.coindesk.com/legal-experts-warn-of-coming-crackdown-on-token-exchanges/

Basically, no one can't prevents ICO's from happening, i.e. sending Bitcoins and getting altcoins in exchange directly from ICO runners. But what regulators can do is to crackdown on exchanges that list ICO tokens, since they are effectively violating new laws that say that tokens are now securities and must be regulated. Storing coins on exchange was always a bad idea, but now it seems even worse.
This also brings a new question - what will regulators do to decentralized exchanges that can't be taken down so easily?
Edit: bonus question - are PoS coins securities?

By default, Multibit was frequently making backups of the wallet, if you still have them, you should try picking different ones when you are using restore wallet (from seed) option. If you are doing this, try using the oldest available backups first.

Alternatively, you can try to import your seed to Electrum 2.9.0 :

Multibit HD: https://youtu.be/E-KcY6KUVnY

Multibit Classic: https://youtu.be/LaijbTcxsv8

I have a strong belief that ETC is a pump and dump scamcoin, used as a tool for insider trading by people like Barry Silbert. Here's a good article if you want to find out more about it
And it's not hard to draw parallels with BCC, who also has it's shadowy figures like Jihan Wu, Roger Ver and Craig Wright. There will be some amount of pumps and dumps, accompanied by FUD against Bitcoin, and this altcoin might stick for a year or two, depending on how much money its beneficiaries can afford to spend. 

This is just a blind prediction. Most traders agree that Bitcoin's price won't drop on August 1st, because most users don't feel any threat from BCC.




BCC forks from BTC blockchain, it's wrong to say it was premined by Bitmain unless you suggest that Bitmain owns significant portion of Bitcoin.



In fact it's the opposite - big blocks will quickly cause centralization of nodes, and this is why Core is against it, even though it would boost Bitcoins capacity in short term. Bitcoins distribution between addresses/users is completely irrelevant.

Bitcoin's freelance markets are making only a tiny fraction of freelance platforms like Upwork, and essentially it serves as connector between employers and workers who couldn't establish payments because of absence of common payment systems in some countries. The other potential way to make money with Bitcoin is to start your own business that utilizes either privacy (which is not perfect, btw) or global payments. All this means that Bitcoin's economy at current state can give jobs only to a very small amount of people.

If Bitcoin's value is very low, like $0.001 in your example, mining becomes a literal waste of power because of near-zero rewards from blocks and fees. This means that difficulty will drop to very low levels, as only true altruists would keep mining (essentially donating their electricity). This means that it would be cheap for some attacker to gather enough hashing power to execute 51% attack and disrupt the network. Conclusion: Bitcoin at $0.001 wouldn't work the same as Bitcoin at $10000.