[2017-12-28] Crypto-Community Grows Skeptical of Bitcoin Forks

[Iloveelvis]

Over the past couple of months, there’s been a “forking fever” taking place as many people have decided to create their own form of the original Bitcoin protocol. A few weeks ago we reported on the ‘Bitcoin God’ snapshot-clone started by the well-known Chinese investor Chandler Guo. Now another snapshot fork is due to happen on December 28 at block height 501,451 called Segwit2x. With so many snapshot-clones being created out of thin air many cryptocurrency enthusiasts are getting leery towards these projects and are even calling them downright “scams.”

Supposedly on December 28 a new form of bitcoin will join the long list of BTC blockchain clones created this year. The latest so-called ‘fork’ will be dubbed “Segwit2x,” after the project that failed to reach consensus this past November. Unlike the vast quantities of clone projects that don’t even have a codebase, the new Segwit2x project does have available code on Github for review. The Segwit2x clone plans to make some significant changes to the legacy codebase such as using the X11 algorithm, a high block generation rate, a Unique address format, and it will increase the block size to 4MB.

Read More Here >>>  https://news.bitcoin.com/crypto-community-grows-skeptical-of-bitcoin-forks/

[hatshepsut93]

The explanation for this forking fever is simple - new Bitcoin mining hardware like dragonmint and S9 is rolling out, and miners are creating new coins to get some profits with their old mining hardware. The guy behind Bitcoin God (ridiculous name), Chandler Guo, is not some investor, he's a pretty big miner. Bcash, the biggest fork up to this date is backed by Bitmain since the beggining. Those coins have no future and no purpose, so I would advice everyone to not buy them, and if you have a chance, dump them asap.

[poor-yorik]

The explanation for this forking fever is simple - new Bitcoin mining hardware like dragonmint and S9 is rolling out, and miners are creating new coins to get some profits with their old mining hardware. The guy behind Bitcoin God (ridiculous name), Chandler Guo, is not some investor, he's a pretty big miner. Bcash, the biggest fork up to this date is backed by Bitmain since the beggining. Those coins have no future and no purpose, so I would advice everyone to not buy them, and if you have a chance, dump them asap.

Interesting view on the matter, thanks for sharing. Also we shouldn't completely discard the intense desire of many people to profit off Bitcoin in every conceivable way. And forking Bitcoin seems to be a new avenue of doing exactly that. It looks like we are going to see even more crappy Bitcoin forks in the new year.

[J. Cooper]

Human beings are very good at overdoing things to the point where nobody will take you seriously anymore. And the same goes for this fork fever all of a sudden. Like seriously I lost interest after the bitcoin gold fork. All the forks that already have been announced and the ones to come, if any, will have little to no impact on bitcoin.

[darkangel11]

Human beings are very good at overdoing things to the point where nobody will take you seriously anymore. And the same goes for this fork fever all of a sudden. Like seriously I lost interest after the bitcoin gold fork. All the forks that already have been announced and the ones to come, if any, will have little to no impact on bitcoin.

I just hope we aren't doing it with BTC right now. Forks are forks, they make free money the way the government makes more money by printing them. The only good thing here is that by issuing more bills the government makes us all poorer, but for now the forks have been making us richer.
I'm starting to see incoming forks as a potential attack on BTC as the greedy investors will most likely become prey of fake coins made to take over your BTC private key.

[squatter]

The explanation for this forking fever is simple - new Bitcoin mining hardware like dragonmint and S9 is rolling out, and miners are creating new coins to get some profits with their old mining hardware. The guy behind Bitcoin God (ridiculous name), Chandler Guo, is not some investor, he's a pretty big miner. Bcash, the biggest fork up to this date is backed by Bitmain since the beggining.

I think it goes further than that. Bitcoin Cash is a special case. In hindsight, I believe that Bitmain created it primarily to exploit covert ASICBOOST. They spent years developing it and Segwit ruled out its use in Bitcoin.

Regarding the other forks, I think the "free money" explanation is a lot more compelling than the mining hardware explanation. Lightning-ASIC (Jack Liao) produces miners compatible with many hashing algorithms; they didn't need Bitcoin Gold for mining. What they saw was that Bitcoin Cash created a massive market cap out of thin air (without taking it from Bitcoin's market). Free money. Hence the pre-mines in a lot of these coins.

Those coins have no future and no purpose, so I would advice everyone to not buy them, and if you have a chance, dump them asap.

I wouldn't dump them ASAP. I would time your sells. Why sell Bitcoin Cash at 0.06 when you could sell it at 0.5?

[iamTom123]

The explanation for this forking fever is simple - new Bitcoin mining hardware like dragonmint and S9 is rolling out, and miners are creating new coins to get some profits with their old mining hardware. The guy behind Bitcoin God (ridiculous name), Chandler Guo, is not some investor, he's a pretty big miner. Bcash, the biggest fork up to this date is backed by Bitmain since the beggining. Those coins have no future and no purpose, so I would advice everyone to not buy them, and if you have a chance, dump them asap.

Things are getting to be ridiculous here. There are people who are thinking that they can really make money out of thin air via the hard fork. Getting fork for the sake of minting coins that can be delivered to the market to imagined interested buyers. I am so tired of all these worthless news about fork and the last one I would appreciate is the BitcoinGold. I am actually hoping that instead of getting the hard fork we can have Bitcoin solved its myriad of problems zeroing on the scalability and the high transaction costs as these are the factors leading many to think that Bitcoin has no more future. Now, fork can already be dangerous as it can clog arteries and makes one sluggish.

[poor-yorik]

I'm starting to see incoming forks as a potential attack on BTC as the greedy investors will most likely become prey of fake coins made to take over your BTC private key.

Honestly, I don't quite understand that. How fake or fork coins can make greedy investors give up their private keys to their real bitcoin holdings? You likely mean public keys but they are readily available on the blockchain anyway, so can you explain what you mean here?

[hatshepsut93]

I think it goes further than that. Bitcoin Cash is a special case. In hindsight, I believe that Bitmain created it primarily to exploit covert ASICBOOST. They spent years developing it and Segwit ruled out its use in Bitcoin.

Regarding the other forks, I think the "free money" explanation is a lot more compelling than the mining hardware explanation. Lightning-ASIC (Jack Liao) produces miners compatible with many hashing algorithms; they didn't need Bitcoin Gold for mining. What they saw was that Bitcoin Cash created a massive market cap out of thin air (without taking it from Bitcoin's market). Free money. Hence the pre-mines in a lot of these coins.

Bcash is a successor of failed forks like BU, Bitcoin XT and Bitcoin Classic, so it's more than just asicboost and mining, the goal is to centralize Bitcoin by removing full nodes from the network, and as the result give full control to miners and big businesses.

I wouldn't dump them ASAP. I would time your sells. Why sell Bitcoin Cash at 0.06 when you could sell it at 0.5?

You can wait for pump, but being a bagholder on altcoin market is generally a bad idea, because over time they tend to decrease in their BTC price. And since every new fork gets worse and worse, it's unlikely that new forks will repeat the patterns of Bcash and Bgold.

[J. Cooper]

Human beings are very good at overdoing things to the point where nobody will take you seriously anymore. And the same goes for this fork fever all of a sudden. Like seriously I lost interest after the bitcoin gold fork. All the forks that already have been announced and the ones to come, if any, will have little to no impact on bitcoin.

I just hope we aren't doing it with BTC right now. Forks are forks, they make free money the way the government makes more money by printing them. The only good thing here is that by issuing more bills the government makes us all poorer, but for now the forks have been making us richer.
I'm starting to see incoming forks as a potential attack on BTC as the greedy investors will most likely become prey of fake coins made to take over your BTC private key.

I had the same fear as you when Bcash forked off bitcoin. I felt like if we would fork bitcoin would lose all of it's credibility and people would extremely confused. But now 2 or even 3 forks later I've reached a point where I can relativise it. FUD after the forks wasn't as bad after all. As long as you don't give out private keys you shouldn't be worried. I also would be cautious calling it money printing because I don't believe it's the case. Forking is just taking another blockchain and 'improving' it thus creating an altcoin. You could argue that value is created out of thin air and in a sense that's true but only if there's a demand for it. If there isn't there's no value. Simple economics.

[darkangel11]

I'm starting to see incoming forks as a potential attack on BTC as the greedy investors will most likely become prey of fake coins made to take over your BTC private key.

Honestly, I don't quite understand that. How fake or fork coins can make greedy investors give up their private keys to their real bitcoin holdings? You likely mean public keys but they are readily available on the blockchain anyway, so can you explain what you mean here?

And how are you going to take a hold of your forked coins? To be able to do it you need to install external software, provided by the devs of that forked coin. In time people will develop new wallet software allowing you to choose, but early on you usually have only one option.
What if that wallet has a backdoor that will allow the devs to know your private key? What if it has a bug that will be compromising your private key somehow? Double spending can be one of these bugs.
I know that you should empty the address of any other coins before putting it into an untested wallet that you don't trust, but many people won't do it and you can expect some people to try to exploit it sooner or later.
The official BTG wallet has been compromised a couple weeks ago. This can happen again and have more serious consequences.

[aoluain]

yes i think the majority in the community are getting skeptical
of all the forking forking goin on in december. It was nice to
get the free bch and btg but if you are not mining....meh

[senne]

Interesting view on the matter, thanks for sharing. Also we shouldn't completely discard the intense desire of many people to profit off Bitcoin in every conceivable way. And forking Bitcoin seems to be a new avenue of doing exactly that. It looks like we are going to see even more crappy Bitcoin forks in the new year.

Exactly, most of the people are just interested in getting free coins in their wallet in 1:1 ratio and hence vote for such coins for the greed of free money without even reading or knowing about the coin. But lately, forks are increasing in number due to which there importance is reducing as none of them gets successful on the long run. They basically target to improve transaction speed and highlight as main advantage but if one need such a speed he/she can easily shift to any other coin.

[poor-yorik]

I'm starting to see incoming forks as a potential attack on BTC as the greedy investors will most likely become prey of fake coins made to take over your BTC private key.

Honestly, I don't quite understand that. How fake or fork coins can make greedy investors give up their private keys to their real bitcoin holdings? You likely mean public keys but they are readily available on the blockchain anyway, so can you explain what you mean here?

And how are you going to take a hold of your forked coins? To be able to do it you need to install external software, provided by the devs of that forked coin. In time people will develop new wallet software allowing you to choose, but early on you usually have only one option.
What if that wallet has a backdoor that will allow the devs to know your private key? What if it has a bug that will be compromising your private key somehow? Double spending can be one of these bugs.
I know that you should empty the address of any other coins before putting it into an untested wallet that you don't trust, but many people won't do it and you can expect some people to try to exploit it sooner or later.
The official BTG wallet has been compromised a couple weeks ago. This can happen again and have more serious consequences.

Okay, now I see your point, and I agree that I didn't take into account the fact that the private keys just like the public ones should be the same on both blockchains. Then yes, the only way to protect yourself from this trick is to empty your original wallet before installing the vanilla wallet for a forked coin and never use it again. Thanks for sharing this knowledge. I will keep this in mind and advise everyone else to do the same.

[BigTeeths]

I was just getting tired of bitcoins forks but then altcoins are also doing their own too. If only exchanges would not support all of these useless forked coins then that would be very beneficial not just on bitcoin but also for the crypto community.

[cynical]

I was just getting tired of bitcoins forks but then altcoins are also doing their own too. If only exchanges would not support all of these useless forked coins then that would be very beneficial not just on bitcoin but also for the crypto community.

well if the exchanges refused to list the forked coins it would indeed help or discourage repetitive forking.
but the exchanges wont refuse because its all revenue for them whether the coin succeeds or fails.
the only successful bitcoin fork to date really is bitcoincash.
to me its just a profit taking excersize so i dont pay too much attention to these new forks especially after the gold one.

[poor-yorik]

I was just getting tired of bitcoins forks but then altcoins are also doing their own too. If only exchanges would not support all of these useless forked coins then that would be very beneficial not just on bitcoin but also for the crypto community.

well if the exchanges refused to list the forked coins it would indeed help or discourage repetitive forking.
but the exchanges wont refuse because its all revenue for them whether the coin succeeds or fails.
the only successful bitcoin fork to date really is bitcoincash.
to me its just a profit taking excersize so i dont pay too much attention to these new forks especially after the gold one.

By listing forks exchanges give users more choice and the possibility of selling the fork coins. Also, they may be no longer happy with Bitcoin and still they might not want to delve into altocoins either. Yeah, I know that Bitcoin forks are no different from altocoins but it is purely psychological. When people see the name Bitcoin they might feel more confidence, though that doesn't mean they should, of course.

[bitcoinisbest]

I was just getting tired of bitcoins forks but then altcoins are also doing their own too. If only exchanges would not support all of these useless forked coins then that would be very beneficial not just on bitcoin but also for the crypto community.

It is now more like a fashion now as there are now few bitcoin fork which would be coming in 2018 and also now altcoins fork is going to happen. People will get tired of all this things and will eventually move out to something else as it is too much to take knowing so many other fork coins which will exists other than the already existing altcoins .