No, you can ignore that in this case. It's caused by BIP91 signalling.

I think that something in your password is confusing the command parser. Maybe take the issue to #bitcoin-core-dev on IRC or github.

That means that it doesn't recognize "walletpassphrase" as a valid command. Maybe you misspelled it.

There's basically no chance that "UAHF" will have any effect on Aug 1. It has no economic support and very little miner support.

Auction ended, final result:

Slots BTC/Slot Person
3 0.75 AlexBessonov
1 0.75 Gunthar
1 0.75 FirstGlobalCredit
2 0.75 TrueFlip.io
1 0.75 bowheadcommunity
1 0.75 Hash_Rush

IMO there are two factors in play:

I've long been thinking that $2000-3000 feels unnaturally high, and may well be a bubble. The 1-year low is like $400 or something, keep in mind. There have been a lot of upward changes in fundamentals, especially the subsidy halving, but a repeat of the 2013-2014 pattern (scaled up) wouldn't surprise me too much.

But the recent drop is almost certainly due to fork panic, and that's way overblown. Let's run through the scenarios:

 - Segwit2x fails to activate SegWit in time, BIP148 fails (my prediction): the status quo continues for 6-12 months, everything is more-or-less fine. I don't think that the market would mind continuing the status quo.
 - Segwit2x activates segwit in time, BIP148 therefore doesn't go off: We get SegWit, which I think would be a minor upward force. The market probably doesn't care that much, but it makes for a good headline at least. Segwit2x could cause further messiness in 3 months, but that's forever away in BTC terms.
 - Segwit2x fails to activate Segwit in time, BIP148 gets miners to activate SegWit quickly: Same as above.
 - Segwit2x fails to activate Segwit in time, BIP148 has significant economic force, but miners don't join it until days later (or never): This is the main eventuality motivating the various warnings, but it's really unlikely IMO, less than a 1% chance. It'll cause a couple days of "downtime" and a massive amount of confusion, but at the end Bitcoin will still be working. And you can keep your coins safe by following the instructions posted on bitcoin.org or in my forum post.
 
If I knew for sure it was all the latter factor, then I would be very inclined to buy right now. But the fork panic may have just kicked off a long-lasting bubble correction; I don't know.

Mycellium and Ledger are fine.


There is no universal decision. Bitcoin is about individual sovereignty, not democracy or dictatorship or whatever. Nobody can decide for you unless you give up your freedom/control by using a bank, etc.

If a split happens at all (which is uncertain), probably it won't be anywhere near a 50-50 split economically. One side will be a tiny minority both economically and in mining power, and this will be apparent only hours after Aug 1. For example, if I can find hardly any sites that accept one side of the split, and the market value of that side's coins is very low, and too few blocks are being produced to realistically transact on that side, then that one is almost certainly not going to survive in any economically-relevant way, and I'll probably call the "all clear" in 12-24 hours.

In the (IMO very unlikely) event that it's a closer split than that, then we'll need to give instructions for choosing a side (or using both) and splitting your coins, as both sides will have value and will probably exist independently for while, possibly indefinitely. Depending on how things look, I might immediately call one side the true Bitcoin for purposes of categorization on bitcointalk.org, or I might leave it undefined for some days to see how things develop further. Though the other side can continue to exist even if categorized by me as an altcoin, of course.

That's fine. Many wallets use 12 words, but some use 24. They do basically the same thing internally.

Don't do the bitaddress.org thing; it's too error-prone to deal with private keys individually.

How GreenAddress works normally is that when someone sends you money, they send to a 2-of-2 multisig requiring a signature from both your private keys and GreenAddress's own private keys. This allows GA to apply extra account protections such as 2-factor-authentication, which you normally can't do if you have a software wallet. But it means that you can't spend your money with just your private keys if you don't take additional steps. Therefore, for maximum trustlessness with GreenAddress, you should do one of these things:

 - Create a 2of3 account in settings, and use just that account. Then you will be able to spend your money with EITHER [your original 24-word mnemonic AND GA's cooperation] OR [your original 24-word mnemonic AND your additional 24-word mnemonic given to you when you create the 2of3 account].
 - Enable sending nLockTime transactions to your email in the settings. This will allow you to spend your BTC with just your private keys after an up-to-90-day wait time.

Again, it's better not to use a Web wallet at all, but GA plus one of those two additional measures is OK.

That's not true.

Some Android wallets should be OK. You want one that allows you to export your private keys. (I don't know which ones allow this, though...)

If you really need a Web wallet, I guess I'd go with GreenAddress. Make sure you either use a 2of3 account (preferable) or that you get your nLockTime transactions emailed to you.

Ziber prepaid now, so their bids are reinstated.

Current auction state:

Slots BTC/Slot Person
3 0.75 AlexBessonov
6 0.70 Ziber

Splitting the coins will be a bit complicated. If such a bad split actually happens, someone (maybe me) will write a detailed guide on how to do it. You can't just do what you're describing there and give one copy of your wallet to wallet software on one chain and one copy of your wallet to wallet software on the other, because any transaction you make from one chain will often still be valid on the other chain. So if there are two chains BTC-X and BTC-Y and you use your BTC-X wallet to send 1 coin to an exchange, your transaction will end up on both chains, and so you'll actually send both 1 BTC-X and 1 BTC-Y simultaneously to the exchange (even though the exchange might only credit you for one of them...). You have to create a special transaction that cleanly splits your coins before you can actually use them separately. (One way of splitting is to taint the coins in one of your wallets with a small amount of money generated post-split.)

Bottom-line: Don't try splitting your coins until someone trustworthy makes a good guide. And don't trust any websites to do it for you, since many scam sites claiming to split coins will probably quickly appear.

Ziber hasn't prepaid, so their bids are cancelled.


Bids must be divisible by 0.05.

(Note that I did approve bowheadcommunity to bid.)

The current auction state:

Slots BTC/Slot Person
3 0.75 AlexBessonov [more info requested]
3 0.55 TrueFlip.io
4 0.55 flippounits
4 0.50 ChipMixer

There is some chance that BIP148 will result in an economic split of the Bitcoin currency at midnight UTC on Aug 1. If this split is non-negligible, then action may be required by all Bitcoin users. Personally, I consider it most likely that the split will be negligible and that you won't have to do anything, but it's still a good idea to prepare just in case.

A very short summary of what you need to do:

1. Ensure that you have no BTC deposited with a Bitcoin bank or other trusted third-party before Aug 1. If there's no technical way for you to export the private keys for your BTC, then that BTC is at risk. Some Bitcoin banks may assure you that they'll definitely keep your BTC safe, but I absolutely wouldn't trust them.
2. Do not send transactions or trust received transactions starting 12 hours before Aug 1 at midnight UTC, and continue this until you hear the "all clear" from several trustworthy sources. For example, I will post a forum news item if everything is OK, or if everything is not OK and action is required.

See my guide here for more a lot more detail: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2012799.0

It's very annoying, but there's no reason to get depressed about it. BIP148 will fail because it was poorly-designed. BIP149 is similar, but well-designed (and therefore slower): it'll finally get the job done in about a year, and the sky won't fall between now and then.


I don't believe it. All of Bitmain's behavior is in-line with them desperately doing everything possible to preserve asicboost. No other theory explains their behavior nearly so well.

That's what I do recommend in the guide...


In the unlikely event that there are are insufficient miners or attacks by miners on an economically-strong currency, it won't be too difficult to fix this with a hardfork (manual difficulty adjustment or PoW change). If Bitcoin is already unusable/unstable/insecure, then there's no additional harm in doing an immediate hardfork. We're not just going live with 1% confirmation speed for several months or whatever.

My post-split instructions will provide guidance for any such ongoing or plausible-future difficulties.

I very much doubt it. That requires 80% miner support, but BitMain has much more than 20%, and they'll never willingly cause SegWit to activate because it destroys asicboost. The current signalling percentages are a result of BitMain trying to get people to think as you do, in order to hurt BIP148's chances. (I think that BIP148 was doomed regardless, but it doesn't help when people are thinking that "segwit2x" will activate SegWit around the same time anyway.)

Fixed.


Close enough; better to be early than late.


There's no risk of that yet.


If you can export your private keys, then it should be possible for you to split the currencies, though in any case it probably won't happen automatically.

I removed the trust scores next to everyone's name on trust pages. They were nice to have, but this massively speeds things up. I wonder if I could reasonably add pagination.

Although it is very undesirable, it is possible for Bitcoin to split into two non-negligible separate currencies.

Why is this possible? / What causes a split?

There is no actual BTC in your Bitcoin wallet: there are only private keys which are used to unlock and then transfer ownership of BTC stored in the Bitcoin system. BTC never actually leaves the Bitcoin system. A split creates a clone of the original cryptocurrency, but with modifications preventing the two cryptocurrencies from actually being the same; after the split, you cannot send coins from one side of the split to the other. After the split, your private key can be used to unlock your coins on both the original system and the modified system.

It's like if someone got their hands on a copy of the google.com database and created super-google.com starting with the google.com database but with different features. You could use the same login credentials to login at either google.com or super-google.com. But after the clone was created, if you received mail.google.com email, it would not show up at mail.super-google.com, and vice-versa. Similarly, you can use the same private key to spend money on the original currency or the modified currency, but after the split they diverge.

Anyone can create a split. It only requires a few lines of code changes. But splits only matter if people of economic significance actually use the split (ie. they must run the modified software).

Splits happen in the following situations:

 - In a contentious hardfork.
 - In a user-activated softfork (UASF) which lacks both majority mining power at the time of activation and near-unanimous support from the economy. If it has one or the other, then a split does not result.
 - In a BIP9-style miner-triggered softfork where a very large number of miners are lying about their enforcement of the softfork. (Unlikely.)

What happens to my bitcoins in a split?

It's similar to a stock spin-off. You have x BTC beforehand, and afterward you have both x BTC and x "BTC-X". But very importantly, your wallet will not magically know that it is now able to unlock both currencies. If your wallet is not updated to account for the split, then you will only be able to spend one of the currencies, probably the more "status-quo" one. Another possibility is that your wallet could be updated, but only to support a different currency than it would've otherwise, not to support both. It is not unreasonable for wallets to support only one currency, since they really weren't originally designed/intended to support multiple. But if your wallet only supports one of the currencies, then you will usually end up throwing away some or all of the other currency when you next send coins after the split, as a side-effect of the transaction -- this is called "replay".

Value is unpredictable. Like a stock split or spin-off, you'd vaguely expect the value of BTC  immediately before the split to equal the sum of the values of "BTC" and "BTC-X" immediately after the split. But if a split like this is anything close to a 50-50 split (in relation to economic adoption/value, not node or miner adoption), then the whole thing will probably be unbelievably, catastrophically messy, which may result in the combined value crashing. On the other hand, if the minority currency is pretty small and things don't get too messy, the minority side could be speculatively overvalued (similar to altcoins) without affecting the majority side too much, causing the combined value to rise somewhat.

Which side of the split is the real Bitcoin?

That depends on a wide variety of factors, and to some degree it is subjective. The most important factor is which currency people/businesses/exchanges accept: if for example one currency is accepted by 95% of the pre-split economy, and the other is accepted by only 5% of the pre-split economy, then the 95% one is probably truly Bitcoin, and the other one can be considered a Bitcoin-derived altcoin. Note that mining power has very little influence here.

Some might say that both currencies post-split are valid incarnations of Bitcoin, but it is my philosophy that only one Bitcoin can exist at any one time; any uncertainty is only a temporary feature, and at least in hindsight there will be a single unbroken path from Satoshi's original Bitcoin to the current one.

What should I do to secure my bitcoins?

First of all, remove all bitcoins possible from banks/exchanges/"hosted wallets". If you can't export your private keys, then you don't actually control the bitcoins. This is a good idea in general, but it's especially important in case of splits. If you're using a Bitcoin bank, then you will have no control over what happens to your coins. Quite possibly, the bank will end up stealing/losing one of the currencies that you should have access to, either through greed/malice or technical incompetence, and the currency they throw away might well be the only one that ends up having any long-term value.

Possible splits are usually predictable some time in advance (see the next section). If in doubt, avoid sending transactions or trusting received transactions 12 hours before and up to a few days after the split time, and check the forum for more news. If a major split happens, I will very likely make a post and news item explaining how to handle the situation. Coins at rest are not at risk.

Generally, after a split:

 - If you want to completely ignore (ie. discard) one of the currencies, and your wallet is already set up to ignore that currency, then you don't have to do anything.
 - If you want to completely ignore (ie. discard) one of the currencies, and your wallet is set up to support only that currency, then you might be able to change the software's settings after the split, or you might have to switch to different wallet software.
 - If you want to use both currencies at the same time or sell one of the currencies, then you will probably have to follow a somewhat-complicated series of steps possibly involving running some extra software in order to cleanly split your coins and eliminate the possibility of replay.

Note that in the Bcash split on Aug 1, 2017, it was relatively easy to split coins, and the above risks mostly did not apply. This is because Bcash had a feature called replay protection. It is possible for a split to lack this feature, in which case the above more stringent measures are necessary.

About the near future / "SegWit2X"

SegWit is already locked-in in Bitcoin. There is zero doubt that Bitcoin will support SegWit. With SegWit, the max block size will be roughly 4MB.

"SegWit2x", also known by the abbreviation B2X, is a potential split proposal. Despite the name, it has nothing to do with SegWit. It doubles the max block size (under SegWit) from 4MB to 8MB. If its supporters go forward with it, B2X would definitely cause a split. As mentioned previously, if you have x BTC before the split, you'll be technically able to claim x B2X as well after a split. However, B2X lacks replay protection, so it will be more difficult to safely acquire your B2X than it was to acquire your BCH in the Bcash split.

The next time when a split is predicted to possibly happen is block 494,784, sometime in November, which is the fork time currently planned by B2X supporters.

OK wallets

The following wallets give you some theoretical way of exporting your private keys, so they should be safe to hold BTC during any split. Depending on what happens after a split, you may have to export your private keys and use different software, though. (Do not go doing this willy-nilly in a panic, though -- wait for agreement and clear instructions from several sources. There will be no rush.)

The ones in bold are ones that I also tend to like for other reasons. The ones in italic seem to make it difficult to export your private keys, or I particularly dislike them for other reasons.

Mobile
Electrum
Mycelium
Bitcoin Wallet for Android
breadwallet
Simple Bitcoin Wallet
Bither
ArcBit
Coin.Space

Desktop
Bitcoin Core
Electrum
Bitcoin Knots
mSIGNA
Armory
Bither
ArcBit

Hardware
Ledger
Trezor
Digital Bitbox
KeepKey

Web
Green Address*
Coin.Space

* Note for Green Address: You must either use a 2of3 account or have nLockTime transactions emailed to you in the settings. Otherwise you're trusting Green Address too much.