Has a forked cryptocurrency ever been more valuable than the original?

[GaryCopywriter]

'Morning/evening all,

I am writing a blog post for a client about blockchain forks that result from software hard-forks - and the new cryptocurrencies this gives rise to - like Bitcoin Diamond and Bitcoin Gold.

One of the questions I have to address is whether the newly created cryptos have any value.

My starting point is to define 'value'. My research suggests that the value of any currency - crypto or otherwise - is derived from

(i)  its usefulness as a medium of exchange and
(ii) its effectiveness as a store of value

My assertion in this piece is going to be that bitcoin itself is not yet a useful medium of exchange nor an effective store of value - and that its perceived value is largely derived from speculative activity.  Therefore its offshoot currencies - being less well-known and having a much shorter track-record - are also going to fall far short of having anything that we could regard as 'value'.

What's your opinion?

Is my assessment of 'value' a useful one? Does bitcoin still have a way to go before it satisfies these criteria and so can be said to have 'value'?

If you believe bitcoin is valuable or useful is some other way, what is it? Which off-shoot currency do you think has proven its worth?

Have any off-shoot currencies - whether it's Diamond or Gold or any other blockchain forked currency like Ether - gone on to out-perform in some way the blockchain that gave rise to them?

Thanks for reading - I've asked a lot so just chip in on the bits you have a view on.

Many thanks,

Gary

[alyssa85]

The answer is YES.

Ethereum is a fork of Ethereum Classic, and is much more valuable than the original.

There is no law saying the original coin must be the most valuable -that is decided by the market. In the case of Ethereum, Vitalek Buterin backed the forked coin and market money flowed to it.

[DdmrDdmr]

An outlier recent case is that of Tbar Token. Tbar token was created as in ICO token by Titanium Blockchain Infrastructure Services (TBIS), being the original token called BAR, an ERC-20 type token.

Last month, TBIS announced it had fallen victim to a malicious attack that resulted in the theft of 18.7 million BAR tokens from corporate company wallets (mostly belonging to team members). These tokens hit the unnoficial exchanges and caused a sudden steep plunge in the BAR Token's value.
As a result, TBIS determined it best to issue a new token by means of a hardfork, TBAR, to replace all BAR legit tokens.

Thus as a result, BAR Token is rendered valueless and TBAR, the forked token, retains at least some value (devaluated due to all the above story which is a torpedo in the credibility of TBIS).

[kaya11]

The answer is YES.

Ethereum is a fork of Ethereum Classic, and is much more valuable than the original.

There is no law saying the original coin must be the most valuable -that is decided by the market. In the case of Ethereum, Vitalek Buterin backed the forked coin and market money flowed to it.

This is the first time I have heard that ethereum was a forked of ETC. I only knew forked coins such as BTG,BTD,BCH from BTC and yet they didn't even manage to get pass on it's price.
First thing comes to my mind when I hear the word fork is a way to pump the original coin's price and having it's new ATH. But now I have a different mindset about it thanks to your deep knowledge.

[fenican]

The amazing thing about the fork of ethereum being more valuable than the original is that the fork committed the cardinal sin of modifying the block chain. A tenet of cryptocurrency is no matter how awful of a theft or bug occurs, the blockchain should be retained unmodified. That's a very strong argument for Ethereum Classic and a reason it may yet become the more valuable.

[sabine80]

The answer is YES.

Ethereum is a fork of Ethereum Classic, and is much more valuable than the original.

There is no law saying the original coin must be the most valuable -that is decided by the market. In the case of Ethereum, Vitalek Buterin backed the forked coin and market money flowed to it.

i didn't know it before. this is interesting. i thought so far, there is no fork, which has more value than the original chain. thanks for this note.

[BrewMaster]

it depends on a lot of things.

first of all a fork does not nessasarily mean that there will be more than 1 coin after it. for example bitcoin had a soft fork a couple of year ago to activate pay to script hash features and nothing happened.
but sometimes when the fork doesn't have enough support (bitcoin cash for example) or when the fork is intentionally creating an altcoin (all the rest of the bitcoin something forks) there will be more than 1 coin afterwards.
as others said the chain with the majority support will always be the original as bitcoin with Segregated Witness is the bitcoin, original or whatever you want to call it and it is worth more be cause of the more demand.

of course there is an exception to this rule and that is when we are talking about centralized altcoins. when such a coin has a fork, the users (the majority) have no say in it, and the centralized entity will define the future of that coin. because of that their fork may have the higher value. and that is what we saw in the roll-back fork of ethereum which created the new thing which effectively killed ethereum's immutability, but because of its centralization and the power of the entity behind it (the ETH foundation) it is worth more, advertised more and gained more popularity.

[gentlemand]

The answer is YES.

Ethereum is a fork of Ethereum Classic, and is much more valuable than the original.

There is no law saying the original coin must be the most valuable -that is decided by the market. In the case of Ethereum, Vitalek Buterin backed the forked coin and market money flowed to it.

ETH is indeed a fork of Ethereum, however the thing that did not fork is the majority of the community. That chose to step across and treat it as something essentially unchanged. Ultimately it's the community that imparts the value and decides how legitimate something is.

Other than that, Lisk was forked from something named Crypti but I'm not sure whether Crypti was ever a fully live chain. There are probably more than a few others too in these rebooting times.