[Guide] Surviving the fork, or How to double your bitcoins (or save fiat)

[jl777]

How hard is it to mergemine?
I dont think miners will have to choose.

How hard is it to choose not to go bankrupt? I dont think many businesses will drop one coin over the other, they will just pretend they are both normal bitcoins. we will just have some growing percentage of bitcoins that are split and thus dramatically increasing the coin supply. not overnight, but over a period of 6 months, we will probably get to where the majority of dualcoins are split, just via normal transactions tainting the dualcoins into two.

I think they can not mergemine since they are mining on different chain by that time

The coins are doubled, however the ecosystem can not double over night, if suddenly the money supply increased by 100% but there is no increased demand, we will get a zimbabwe coin

Isnt NMC mergemined with BTC since they both use SHA256?
isnt NMC a different chain than BTC?

Mergemining is to just use the same calcs you use as you are randomly searching for the winning hash against multiple chains. The extra overhead of adding another chain is much less than double, so you basically get to mint extra coins for very little extra work.

Based on this, the whole XT controversy could well be something FULLY backed by the miners
Follow the money

Due to the inertia of markets, this creates non-attack methods of double spending that isnt really double spending because we are all knowing that there will be two flavors of bitcoin. so by following the protocol, we can split our bitcoins. by knowing that markets dont do discontinuities, we can protect against the massive drop in BTC price this whole inventory explosion will create.

Do you really believe that the BTC whales wont take the time to split their dualcoins? And then they wont bother to make a ton of money by trading both coins?

James

[Mickeyb]

So I see the thread growing, so I would like to ask for a summary please. What have we concluded so far? Will it be, or will it not be possible to double your bitcoins if the fork happens and we end up with 2 chains?

well you wont be able to directly double your bitcoins, but you can split all your bitcoins into winnercoins and losercoins. By trading them close to zerohour, you should be able to get roughly the same amount for each. Good traders will be able to sell winnercoin for more than losercoin and losercoin for more than winner coin by taking advantage of the market chaos.

Now your single dualcoin is split into winnercoin and losercoin due to the fact that there are XT outputs that will invalidated a tx in the eyes of corecoin.

The problem here is that we will end up with miners mergemining both (unlike normal merge mining where they are getting some sillycoin, they get losercoin) and there will be double the volume of sales so the price of both will be hammered.

I would recommend to split your bitcoins into winnercoin and losercoin as soon as possible after zerohour, sell them (via limit orders) into something that will hold its value. then when one side reaches more than 50% value of the other in a stable way (ie not a spike) to purchase them. if you have the time, just make a ladder so that as one side gets worth more and more against the other you are shifting more and more capital into it.

Done right you should end up with 50%+ more of winnercoin vs the number of dualcoins you have

James

From a value point of view, since a fork into two chains break the promise of limited money supply, it essentially killed bitcoin. I guess long before XT hashing power reaching 50%, the bitcoin value would already be single digits

This was my first thought after reading the reply above and this thread completely. If all this s**t will be possible, Bitcoin deserves to die and to be priced in single digits and to stay there, once and for all!

[dasource]

The old wisdom is don't fix it if it ain't broken. I guest majority of the miners will take a wait and see stance. Recent stress test already showed that even every block is above 1MB, the network still works well

That does not work when you are trying to revolutionize sectors ... we do not want to stay in the stone ages

Banks stayed in stone age for hundreds of years and that's the reason they become the master slaveholder. Value is all about stability and integrity

So basically it will become another piece of worthless technology that could have been awesome but never made it because a group of grown ass intelligent men AKA self proclaimed core developers spent more time throwing their toys out of the pram than working together to find a common way forward. Sounds legit

[turvarya]

Lets be sensible here ... if larger blocks starts to get more traction and lets be fair we already have 65%+ mining power voting for larger blocks (notice how I said larger blocks and not necessarily XT) then *business* like exchanges will prepare themselves to be on the right side of the chain (be it XT or whatever it is that supports larger blocks)

The interesting thing here which everyone seems to miss is that XT has started a process which the none-XT/larger block pro developers need to respond to with a solution. Miners and Exchanges (who seems largely in the larger blocks group) are not going to wait around forever.

Grab your popcorn and lets see how this all unfolds ... It is going to be interesting for sure.

The old wisdom is don't fix it if it ain't broken. I guest majority of the miners will take a wait and see stance. Recent stress test already showed that even every block is receiving more than 1MB of data, the network still works well

I don't know your line of work, mine is Software Development and I never worked for a company that holds this old wisdom. If you are not innovative and see new trends before they happen, your company dies.
There might be exceptions, when you are big enough or have political influence, but not everybody is Microsoft or a Bank.

[jl777]

The old wisdom is don't fix it if it ain't broken. I guest majority of the miners will take a wait and see stance. Recent stress test already showed that even every block is above 1MB, the network still works well

That does not work when you are trying to revolutionize sectors ... we do not want to stay in the stone ages

Banks stayed in stone age for hundreds of years and that's the reason they become the master slaveholder. Value is all about stability and integrity

So basically it will become another piece of worthless technology that could have been awesome but never made it because a group of grown ass intelligent men AKA self proclaimed core developers spent more time throwing their toys out of the pram than working together to find a common way forward. Sounds legit

well the margins on mining was getting pretty low and this is a good way to boost revenues 50% by merge mining

[johnyj]

How hard is it to mergemine?
I dont think miners will have to choose.

How hard is it to choose not to go bankrupt? I dont think many businesses will drop one coin over the other, they will just pretend they are both normal bitcoins. we will just have some growing percentage of bitcoins that are split and thus dramatically increasing the coin supply. not overnight, but over a period of 6 months, we will probably get to where the majority of dualcoins are split, just via normal transactions tainting the dualcoins into two.

I think they can not mergemine since they are mining on different chain by that time

The coins are doubled, however the ecosystem can not double over night, if suddenly the money supply increased by 100% but there is no increased demand, we will get a zimbabwe coin

Isnt NMC mergemined with BTC since they both use SHA256?
isnt NMC a different chain than BTC?

Mergemining is to just use the same calcs you use as you are randomly searching for the winning hash against multiple chains. The extra overhead of adding another chain is much less than double, so you basically get to mint extra coins for very little extra work.

Based on this, the whole XT controversy could well be something FULLY backed by the miners
Follow the money

Due to the inertia of markets, this creates non-attack methods of double spending that isnt really double spending because we are all knowing that there will be two flavors of bitcoin. so by following the protocol, we can split our bitcoins. by knowing that markets dont do discontinuities, we can protect against the massive drop in BTC price this whole inventory explosion will create.

Do you really believe that the BTC whales wont take the time to split their dualcoins? And then they wont bother to make a ton of money by trading both coins?

James

They can only merge mine if the protocol is specifically changed for that purpose

There are huge risk from existing coin holders: We often talk about Satoshi's 1 million coins, many are afraid that those coin will come out one day and crash the market, and several days ago we have witnessed that a 80K sell order will knock down the exchange rate by 10%

Imagine that you are a large bitcoin holder, when there is only one chain, the motivation to sell your coin is low, since they are all valuable. But once the coin forked, it is possible that core miners who controlls 25% of hash power are controlling 70% of the existing coins. They will dump the coins on the XT chain and destroy its value (Remember what Peter Todd have threatened with selling all his coins?). When XT coin worth nothing, miner will move their hash power back to core chain. Similarly, XT developers will dump their core coins, cause large damage there. A Mutual Assured Destruction fired up when XT went online 1.Jan. 2016, the end of bitcoin

So things will get really ugly if we allow a fork to happen

[jl777]

How hard is it to mergemine?
I dont think miners will have to choose.

How hard is it to choose not to go bankrupt? I dont think many businesses will drop one coin over the other, they will just pretend they are both normal bitcoins. we will just have some growing percentage of bitcoins that are split and thus dramatically increasing the coin supply. not overnight, but over a period of 6 months, we will probably get to where the majority of dualcoins are split, just via normal transactions tainting the dualcoins into two.

I think they can not mergemine since they are mining on different chain by that time

The coins are doubled, however the ecosystem can not double over night, if suddenly the money supply increased by 100% but there is no increased demand, we will get a zimbabwe coin

Isnt NMC mergemined with BTC since they both use SHA256?
isnt NMC a different chain than BTC?

Mergemining is to just use the same calcs you use as you are randomly searching for the winning hash against multiple chains. The extra overhead of adding another chain is much less than double, so you basically get to mint extra coins for very little extra work.

Based on this, the whole XT controversy could well be something FULLY backed by the miners
Follow the money

Due to the inertia of markets, this creates non-attack methods of double spending that isnt really double spending because we are all knowing that there will be two flavors of bitcoin. so by following the protocol, we can split our bitcoins. by knowing that markets dont do discontinuities, we can protect against the massive drop in BTC price this whole inventory explosion will create.

Do you really believe that the BTC whales wont take the time to split their dualcoins? And then they wont bother to make a ton of money by trading both coins?

James

They can only merge mine if the protocol is specifically changed for that purpose

There are huge risk from existing coin holders: We often talk about Satoshi's 1 million coins, many are afraid that those coin will come out one day and crash the market, and several days ago we have witnessed that a 80K sell order will knock down the exchange rate by 10%

Imagine that you are a large bitcoin holder, when there is only one chain, the motivation to sell your coin is low, since they are all valuable. But once the coin forked, it is possible that core miners who controlls 25% of hash power are controlling 70% of the existing coins. They will dump the coins on the XT chain and destroy its value (Remember what Peter Todd have threatened with selling all his coins?). When XT coin worth nothing, miner will move their hash power back to core chain. Similarly, XT developers will dump their core coins, cause large damage there. A Mutual Assured Destruction fired up when XT went online 1.Jan. 2016, the end of bitcoin

So things will get really ugly if we allow a fork to happen

http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/273/how-does-merged-mining-work

please explain what protocol change is needed to allow merge mining XTcoin and corecoin?

please estimate what percentage of the chinese mining pools will not merge mine to make extra money, if merge mining is possible

[TwinWinNerD]

How hard is it to mergemine?
I dont think miners will have to choose.

How hard is it to choose not to go bankrupt? I dont think many businesses will drop one coin over the other, they will just pretend they are both normal bitcoins. we will just have some growing percentage of bitcoins that are split and thus dramatically increasing the coin supply. not overnight, but over a period of 6 months, we will probably get to where the majority of dualcoins are split, just via normal transactions tainting the dualcoins into two.

I think they can not mergemine since they are mining on different chain by that time

The coins are doubled, however the ecosystem can not double over night, if suddenly the money supply increased by 100% but there is no increased demand, we will get a zimbabwe coin

Isnt NMC mergemined with BTC since they both use SHA256?
isnt NMC a different chain than BTC?

Mergemining is to just use the same calcs you use as you are randomly searching for the winning hash against multiple chains. The extra overhead of adding another chain is much less than double, so you basically get to mint extra coins for very little extra work.

Based on this, the whole XT controversy could well be something FULLY backed by the miners
Follow the money

Due to the inertia of markets, this creates non-attack methods of double spending that isnt really double spending because we are all knowing that there will be two flavors of bitcoin. so by following the protocol, we can split our bitcoins. by knowing that markets dont do discontinuities, we can protect against the massive drop in BTC price this whole inventory explosion will create.

Do you really believe that the BTC whales wont take the time to split their dualcoins? And then they wont bother to make a ton of money by trading both coins?

James

They can only merge mine if the protocol is specifically changed for that purpose

There are huge risk from existing coin holders: We often talk about Satoshi's 1 million coins, many are afraid that those coin will come out one day and crash the market, and several days ago we have witnessed that a 80K sell order will knock down the exchange rate by 10%

Imagine that you are a large bitcoin holder, when there is only one chain, the motivation to sell your coin is low, since they are all valuable. But once the coin forked, it is possible that core miners who controlls 25% of hash power are controlling 70% of the existing coins. They will dump the coins on the XT chain and destroy its value (Remember what Peter Todd have threatened with selling all his coins?). When XT coin worth nothing, miner will move their hash power back to core chain. Similarly, XT developers will dump their core coins, cause large damage there. A Mutual Assured Destruction fired up when XT went online 1.Jan. 2016, the end of bitcoin

So things will get really ugly if we allow a fork to happen

http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/273/how-does-merged-mining-work

please explain what protocol change is needed to allow merge mining XTcoin and corecoin?

please estimate what percentage of the chinese mining pools will not merge mine to make extra money, if merge mining is possible

Merge mining after the fork will be impossible as soon as atleast one different block is found. You need to include the merkle tree in the block you are mining. and the merkle trees will differ after the first block after the fork.

If the losing form decides to allow merge mining, yeah maybe it can be implemented. But I'd wager heavy money against two existing significant chains anyway. Will just not happen

[Come-from-Beyond]

I don't think, there is an economical incentive to keep on the weaker chain.

This may be interesting for you - https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Economic_majority. It's not the miners who decide.

[johnyj]

Lets be sensible here ... if larger blocks starts to get more traction and lets be fair we already have 65%+ mining power voting for larger blocks (notice how I said larger blocks and not necessarily XT) then *business* like exchanges will prepare themselves to be on the right side of the chain (be it XT or whatever it is that supports larger blocks)

The interesting thing here which everyone seems to miss is that XT has started a process which the none-XT/larger block pro developers need to respond to with a solution. Miners and Exchanges (who seems largely in the larger blocks group) are not going to wait around forever.

Grab your popcorn and lets see how this all unfolds ... It is going to be interesting for sure.

The old wisdom is don't fix it if it ain't broken. I guest majority of the miners will take a wait and see stance. Recent stress test already showed that even every block is receiving more than 1MB of data, the network still works well

I don't know your line of work, mine is Software Development and I never worked for a company that holds this old wisdom. If you are not innovative and see new trends before they happen, your company dies.
There might be exceptions, when you are big enough or have political influence, but not everybody is Microsoft or a Bank.

The larger the system the slower the change. Since every change in a large system would have a wide impact. You can't make a cruiser that holds 5000 people to turn like a water scooter

[turvarya]

I don't think, there is an economical incentive to keep on the weaker chain.

This may be interesting for you - https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Economic_majority. It's not the miners who decide.

That still doesn't show an economical incentive to stay on the weaker chain.
Maybe you could describe it further? (That is not a rhetorical question. I am really curious.)

[jl777]

How hard is it to mergemine?
I dont think miners will have to choose.

How hard is it to choose not to go bankrupt? I dont think many businesses will drop one coin over the other, they will just pretend they are both normal bitcoins. we will just have some growing percentage of bitcoins that are split and thus dramatically increasing the coin supply. not overnight, but over a period of 6 months, we will probably get to where the majority of dualcoins are split, just via normal transactions tainting the dualcoins into two.

I think they can not mergemine since they are mining on different chain by that time

The coins are doubled, however the ecosystem can not double over night, if suddenly the money supply increased by 100% but there is no increased demand, we will get a zimbabwe coin

Isnt NMC mergemined with BTC since they both use SHA256?
isnt NMC a different chain than BTC?

Mergemining is to just use the same calcs you use as you are randomly searching for the winning hash against multiple chains. The extra overhead of adding another chain is much less than double, so you basically get to mint extra coins for very little extra work.

Based on this, the whole XT controversy could well be something FULLY backed by the miners
Follow the money

Due to the inertia of markets, this creates non-attack methods of double spending that isnt really double spending because we are all knowing that there will be two flavors of bitcoin. so by following the protocol, we can split our bitcoins. by knowing that markets dont do discontinuities, we can protect against the massive drop in BTC price this whole inventory explosion will create.

Do you really believe that the BTC whales wont take the time to split their dualcoins? And then they wont bother to make a ton of money by trading both coins?

James

They can only merge mine if the protocol is specifically changed for that purpose

There are huge risk from existing coin holders: We often talk about Satoshi's 1 million coins, many are afraid that those coin will come out one day and crash the market, and several days ago we have witnessed that a 80K sell order will knock down the exchange rate by 10%

Imagine that you are a large bitcoin holder, when there is only one chain, the motivation to sell your coin is low, since they are all valuable. But once the coin forked, it is possible that core miners who controlls 25% of hash power are controlling 70% of the existing coins. They will dump the coins on the XT chain and destroy its value (Remember what Peter Todd have threatened with selling all his coins?). When XT coin worth nothing, miner will move their hash power back to core chain. Similarly, XT developers will dump their core coins, cause large damage there. A Mutual Assured Destruction fired up when XT went online 1.Jan. 2016, the end of bitcoin

So things will get really ugly if we allow a fork to happen

http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/273/how-does-merged-mining-work

please explain what protocol change is needed to allow merge mining XTcoin and corecoin?

please estimate what percentage of the chinese mining pools will not merge mine to make extra money, if merge mining is possible

Merge mining after the fork will be impossible as soon as atleast one different block is found. You need to include the merkle tree in the block you are mining. and the merkle trees will differ after the first block after the fork.

If the losing form decides to allow merge mining, yeah maybe it can be implemented. But I'd wager heavy money against two existing significant chains anyway. Will just not happen

Technically if I have found a winning hash for a chain, how will you prevent me from submitting it?

It is the mining equipment that just needs to be changed. as far as the coin protocol is concerned it cannot monitor if you are submitting to other chains. How will the corechain know that the node that submitted the winning hash is also submitting winning hashes to the XT chain.

Maybe there is something about the mining process that you know that I totally missed.

James

P.S. i shouldnt call this merged mining that means specific things, think of it as parallel mining. will require some mods to silicon to do, so depending on the relative values, maybe it is not so practical. then again if you can make custom silicon...

[Come-from-Beyond]

That still doesn't show an economical incentive to stay on the weaker chain.
Maybe you could describe it further? (That is not a rhetorical question. I am really curious.)

The fork will happen if 75% of blocks are mined by miners who support it. This is a quite silly indicator because it's not the miners who decide what changes are good/bad. NotBitcoinXT makes it worse, we can't trust even the number of blocks. What an average Joe will do? A sane average Joe will try to sit on the both chairs until he clearly sees what happens. And the most rational behavior is to follow the guide to maximize profit (minimize loss).

[Come-from-Beyond]

It has just come to my mind. If most of us sell soon after the fork then the price of the both chains will plummet. If someone believes that the price will go down significantly and he is not sure that he will do the split of the coins in time then it's better to sell before the fork and still get more fiat than after selling doubled bitcoins... All this looks like a catch 22, the price will go down anyway...

[ngdias]

1. Move your bitcoins to a wallet controlled only by YOU. If it's a webwallet like BlockChain.Info it's still strongly recommended to download original Satoshi's wallet software and start downloading 40 GiB of the blockchain. If you leave your coins somewhere on the Internet you may be unable to double them once the fork happens.

Instead of dloading the blockchain maybe we could use an electrum wallet?

And can we expect someone to write a tool to inspect the blockchain and confirm those 'fresh satoshis' exclusive to one chain that someone sent you were actually created after the fork?

[Come-from-Beyond]

Instead of dloading the blockchain maybe we could use an electrum wallet?

And can we expect someone to write a tool to inspect the blockchain and confirm those 'fresh satoshis' exclusive to one chain that someone sent you were actually created after the fork?

You have to have a copy of the blockchains to be able to send coins in the both versions. I'm not sure if Electrum provides such service after the fork.

I think someone will write such tool, those who will be selling exclusive coins, for example.

[nexern]

miners can't decide on their own, true. but a combo of a few major miners/exchanges will do.
a miner would never switch to XT, if he can't find an exchange (running XT) to cash out.

however, the two top pools don't running XT (yet) >> https://www.blocktrail.com/BTC/blocks/1
discus and ant are key as seen by this pool block distribution >> http://mempool.info/pools

[nexern]

the whole XT freak show is very interesting and educational to watch,
how people are changing heavily as soon they fear to loose something and
how all participants in this game (user/service provider/exchanges/miner etc.)
moving around to find their optimal equilibrium, mostly driven by greed.

not sure if theymos is aware, on what kind of treasure he sits with this forum,
i am sure that academical in deep research on this data could feed several
generations of sociologists, psychologists and other disciplines.

machiavelli was yesterday, here comes bitcoin and the fork btw won't happen.

[jstnrgrs]

Something else came to my mind:

If both chains continue to exist, would it be possible to do 'merged mining' on both blockchains,
similar to merged mining of BTC and NMC today ?

No one has answered this.  The answer must be yes, it would be possible with a modified client. 
Another scenario comes up when you consider the shadow miners, all the at-home ASIC owners who turned off their machines as they lost out to the mega-miners.   They'd surely consider turning them back onto mining on the "losing" fork at reduced value, because the difficulty will drop dramatically as well.   Shadow miners are mostly from the idealistic phase of Bitcoin, so their incentive to continue on Core if XT wins out will be great.

Both forks continue, one will not die to zero.   One may become sub $1 again, but that's OK for some people.

OK - this actually made me think of something I haven't seen elsewhere.....
Let's assume the above scenario does occur - a fork where both chains survive.  What happens to the "finite number" of Bitcoin.  I mean, say you have 15 million Bitcoin at Zero Hour.  Then say XT Fork wins, and the vast majority of Bitcoins choose that chain.

But say 1 Million of those Bitcoin Holders choose the Core Chain.   Does that mean that the New Finite number of bitcoins that will ever exist on XT will now be 20 million?

NOTE:  I also still can't understand what is going to drive people to stay on Core IF XT Chain wins and takes off.  Because in that scenario there is almost a 100% chance that Bitcoin XT will start moving up in value, and Bitcoin-Core will start devaluing massively in the immediate aftermath.  I just am trying to imagine sitting there looking at my wallet with a Bitcoin in it, and saying if I take the right hand path I get $200+ and if I go left I get $20 - and then deciding to do the STUPID thing.  I mean - why wouldn't I just go to XT for a lot more value, then sell for dollars, then go back and buy TEN (10) Bitcoin-Core (now a minor fork altcoin).  I mean - I am thinking that is the path people would take???  I would.

No, it doesn't.
That's like saying "Will LiteCoin reduce the amount of Bitcoin?"
If there is a fork, it doesn't care about the other fork, it's really just as easy as that.

This is right.  Don't think of a fork as dividing bitcoin into two pieces.  Think of it as creating a parallel universe.  (The fiat money invested would divide though.)

[andyatcrux]

Well, 2 blocks bitcoin mined with XT, or 0.08%

Long way to go to 75%.