You have negative trust for me, so I won't accept your bids.

melissa_sapmaz is cleared for up to 1 slot -- bids for more slots should be considered tentative.

atbcoincom PMed me canceling his bid.

Current auction status:

Slots BTC/Slot Person
4 0.65 ChipMixer
1 0.65 gritter
2 0.65 jamieebotwin
1 0.65 ATB Coin
1 0.65 Gunthar

The auction continues.

That sounds plausible, but I don't know enough about how the nano S works to say for sure.

The point of that is to avoid giving private keys full of BTC to hosted wallets or largely-untested BCH software.

blockchain.info removed the ability to export private keys. You need to regenerate them from scratch using the deterministic wallet stuff.

It should be possible to claim your BCH, but it may be difficult. You'll probably have to wait for someone to figure it out over the course of the next few weeks.


I haven't tried any of them. The first thing I'd try would be ElectrumCash. But you have to be really careful, since now would be a perfect time for someone to put wallet-stealing malware in one of these pieces of software. That's why I recommended using a completely separate computer.

That's not necessary in any technical sense AFAICT. I can't predict prices, though.


If you actually want to hold BCH for any length of time, I'd use a software wallet in which you control the private keys.

Some e-wallets (eg. Coinbase) will have just destroyed or taken for themselves the BCH that you should've been entitled to. That's partly why we've been warning people to exit hosted wallets. Some others might still credit you your BCH later.


They will be the same addresses. On the Bitcoin network and in a Bitcoin wallet, they will be empty. On the Bcash network and for Bcash wallets, they will still have the same balance that they had around 14:00 UTC.


Yes, you should in that case open the wallet in Bitcoin wallet software again. A Bcash wallet won't see those transactions.

I recommend phasing out your old addresses, since I don't trust the security of Bcash wallets that you'll be giving your private keys to. If it would be difficult to phase out your old addresses, then I don't particularly recommend using this method of claiming your BCH. Other methods that don't involve giving your private keys to a Bcash wallet will become available in the coming weeks.


The exact moment of the split was not 12:20 or 14:00, but sometime between those. I haven't figured out yet when the exact split time was, though. I think that 12:22 was probably pre-split.

Bcash has now mined a few blocks without any unexpected issues, and a lot of time has passed since BIP148 activated, so I am at this point comfortable calling the all clear. See my summary topic here for more info: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2059111.0

Executive summary

Bitcoin is working fine and you can use it as you were before, possibly with slightly more reorg risk for a while.

The BIP91/BIP148 split didn't occur

As had been expected for the last week or so, the big potential split which caused all of the Aug 1 hubbub didn't happen, due to BIP91/BIP148 succeeding. There's a small chance that this split could still happen sometime between now and around Aug 10, but it looks very unlikely at this point.

Bcash split, creating an altcoin

If you had some number of BTC as of approximately 14:00 UTC, and if these bitcoins were secured by private keys controlled by you or in a Bcash-supporting online wallet, it is now possible for you to claim the same number of Bcash coins (BCH/BCC). Bcash is an altcoin based on Bitcoin; since it split, it is now 100% independent from Bitcoin other than the carried-over balances.

Bcash claims to have replay protection, but this is only a Bcash miner policy. Any Bcash miner could still replay transactions. Therefore, you can't safely rely on it.

Instructions for safely splitting your BCH from your BTC

Here are general split instructions. If your wallet software gives different instructions, use those instead.

These are the best instructions I could come up with quickly. Maybe someone will eventually come up with a more convenient way of doing it. Note that while I believe these instructions to be safe and reasonable, you are solely responsible for your safety here.

 1. Decide whether you want to bother splitting your coins at all. Is it actually worthwhile to remove your coins from cold storage (or whatever)? If you take no particular action and continue using Bitcoin as normal, then your BCH is likely (but not guaranteed) to remain associated with the current private keys due to BCH's pseudo-replay-protection; you could therefore maybe claim your BCH later on if you want. If you want to claim your BCH now, continue to the next steps.
 2. Create a totally new logical wallet with a new mnemonic, etc. Just creating new addresses is not sufficient: the new wallet needs to be completely separate from the old one. The new wallet's private keys should be under your personal control just in case your transaction is replayed or something else goes wrong. Make sure you have backups of the new wallet.
 3. Send all of the BTC in your old wallet to your new wallet, and wait until this transaction has 30 confirmations. (If you are really itching to get your BCH, it would not be totally crazy to wait for as few as 3 confirmations, but there is some risk with that.) Note that sending all of your BTC in a single transaction is likely to be harmful to your privacy; if you care about this, you might want to send it in several smaller transactions to several different addresses on the new wallet.
 4. On a separate computer that you wouldn't too much mind being compromised, install a BCash wallet such as one of the ones listed on bitcoincash.org. (Warning: some Bcash wallets are known to overwrite important files belonging to their Bitcoin counterparts.) Or use a Web-based exchange/wallet supporting Bcash. Import the private keys from your old, now-empty Bitcoin wallet into this Bcash wallet. Now you have BCH which you can handle as you wish. Note that BCH transactions may be very slow to confirm for a couple of days.

Continuing risks

Although I am giving a general "all clear" at this point because the risk of serious issues has dropped substantially, some turbulence is still possible due to BIP91/BIP148 and the rollout of SegWit:

 - If you are using a full-node wallet (eg. Bitcoin Core), you should require 30 confirmations for high-value, untrusted incoming transactions until SegWit locks in around Aug 10. Although seemingly quite unlikely at this point, it is possible that miners could fail to enforce BIP91/BIP148, which could cause very long reorgs (ie. confirmations could disappear, allowing double-spending). This seems unlikely enough that I probably wouldn't require extra confirmations for "normal" transactions, but if you absolutely cannot tolerate any particular transaction being reversed, then waiting for 30 confirmations would be most prudent.
 - If you are using a lightweight wallet, you should require 30 confirmations for all untrusted incoming transactions until SegWit locks in around Aug 10, and again for a couple of weeks after SegWit finally activates around Aug 24. Long reorgs or even persistent splits are possible if miners fail to properly enforce the rules of BIP91, BIP148, or SegWit, and lightweight wallets are particularly poor at handling such things because they will blindly accept invalid, probably-soon-to-be-orphaned blocks.
 - I don't recommend putting much BTC on hosted wallets / exchanges generally. Exactly how the above risks would be translated to these services will vary depending on how each service handles deposits, reorgs, and double-spends.

How BCH works is that if no blocks are produced in some (6?) hours, then the difficulty gets reduced by 25%. So it can't die from lack of miners, though it may be very slow for a few days.


That's always their excuse...

Someone did spin up like 4000 AWS BCH nodes (or at least 4000 IPs -- maybe they're all pointing to a few nodes), possibly as a DoS attack against them, or possibly as a publicity stunt ("OMG look at this incredible BCH adoption!"). They're not listening on the correct port, so I don't think that it'd be an effective DoS; nodes won't normally connect to them.

There are problems with how BCH's P2P network works in general, as well.

They have one pool on Bitcoin and one on Bcash.

Update

Bcash split at roughly 14:00 UTC. If you had BTC at (roughly) that point, then it should now be theoretically possible to split your coins. However, Bcash hasn't actually produced any blocks yet, maybe due to the way their difficulty adjusts, or maybe due to bugs (eg. I've heard that Bcash peers are sometimes banning each other).

Bitcoin is fine, and as expected, there was no BIP148/BIP91 split. I'm going to wait a few more hours before putting a green "all clear" thing in the news, but I'd feel pretty safe using Bitcoin normally now. Note that due to Bcash's pseudo-replay-protection, it is likely (but maybe not guaranteed) that Bitcoin transactions will not affect your Bcash balance.

If BCH doesn't crash and burn on a technical level, which it very well might, then I think that there will be three stages:

1. For the next 2-4 days, people will have BCH and be trading it inside of exchanges, but will not be able to readily deposit or withdraw it because BCH blocks will be mined very slowly. This will cause a very inflated price on at least some exchanges.
2. Over the course of a few weeks after that, it will be driven absolutely into the ground as people dump their free BCH.
3. Then it will recover somewhat and hover between 0.001 to 0.01 BTC as a maybe slightly-above-average altcoin. Depending on how committed its supporters are, it could continue indefinitely similar to Litecoin or peter out after some time.

Upper-layer protocols like Bitcoin experience a TCP socket as a stream of bytes. So from a node's perspective, it writes to an outgoing stream per peer in a manner like "versionVerackAddrInvBlock...", with messages just stuck together, and a similar incoming stream per peer. The fact that things are actually broken up into packets by TCP isn't generally something that users of TCP have to worry about (except sometimes for optimization reasons). A Bitcoin message can be broken into multiple TCP packets (if it's too large for one), and a TCP packet can contain multiple Bitcoin messages (if Bitcoin Core happens to send two Bitcoin message very close together so that the OS can batch them). If you're interested in Bitcoin rather than TCP, then you shouldn't really worry about this: just stick all of the TCP payloads together.

Try writing a simple TCP server and client in C or something using the basic syscalls. It's pretty simple, and it'll give you more understanding of how it works from the perspective of a TCP user.

It hasn't happened yet. It'll be sometime after 12:20 UTC.

Maybe the YoBit thing makes sense if they don't allow withdrawals.

It was merged by a moderator. Posting twice in a row within 24 hours isn't allowed even in selfmod threads because it unfairly bumps the thread.

The messed up text is mojibake as a result of charset-mismatch issues, probably caused by a partially-loaded page or weird configuration at the moderator's end. I haven't seen this particular thing happen before, so I'll assume for now that it was a momentary glitch somewhere. I fixed it.

Note that the 12:20 UTC split time for Bcash is approximate, and the split time could happen some time after that.

Aug 1 schedule

Here's what's expected to happen:

00:00 UTC: possible split 1

This is the BIP148 possible split point, which is what motivated all of the Aug 1 hubub. But due to BIP91's successful activation about a week ago, it is most likely that nothing of note will actually happen. It is however possible that the unexpected could occur.

12:20 UTC: split 2

BCash (BCH/BCC) is expected to split some time after 12:20 UTC. If you have a confirmed BTC balance as of approximately 12:20 UTC, and if you control your private keys, then it should be possible for you to claim an equal amount of BCH. Note that BCH is incompatible with Bitcoin (ie. it can fairly be described as an altcoin), so this split is not expected to affect Bitcoin in any technical way except perhaps some reduction in hashrate.

13:00-23:59 UTC: split instructions and all-clear

If nothing goes unexpectedly in the above two events, I will be aiming to post BCH split instructions and a final summary / "all-clear" before the end of the day, UTC. If something does go unexpectedly, then I will post an update about that ASAP.

Removed, thanks.

I do some basic research on ads before accepting them in order to avoid ads for things which could be unexpectedly risky for forum users (eg. I just refused an ad for a brand new site which takes deposits, as that is generally risky), but I can't catch them all, unfortunately. In this case, I did my investigation around the 15th, which predated those scam accusations. After that, I didn't notice that there were any problems or I would've pulled it immediately.