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The Bitcoin Gold Fork that caused a temporary and minor decline in the price of Bitcoin a few weeks ago attracted the two "boos" and "bravos" of the cryptocurrency community. Most observers have not expressed any problem with the forks as a tool for competition and experimentation, but some consider that the ranges compromise the perception of the limited supply of bitcoin, which they consider critical for its underlying value.
After starting nearly $ 500 on October 24, Bitcoin Gold (BTG), a bitcoin that, like Bitcoin Cash, has a shared blockchain story with bitcoin, saw its price drop to $ 136 in two days – traders who wanted to buy it to pay back the lenders. The price has stabilized since that date, setting at $ 140.63 on Nov. 5, according to the coinmarketcap.com website.
Many Bitcoin community members quickly criticized Bitcoin Gold because of what they saw as an impractical idea of decentralizing the extraction of bitcoins, and also because of its intention to set up cryptocurrency. Many investors, traders, developers and users do not like the concept of creating a cryptocurrency before its launch, as this leads to a centralization of funds before the launch.
Nevertheless, several exchanges – including Bitfinex and HitBTC – have credited their users with BTG balances and added trading pairs, although they can not activate deposits or withdrawals as long as the mainnet does not. is not stable.
Forks serving a purpose
"There is no" bad fork, "said Bob Summerwill, chief blockchain developer at Sweetbridge, a blockchain alliance, in a prepared statement." You Do not Have to Encourage a team or the other. The experimentation and the competition are good. Let the market decide and participate where you see value. "
Summerwill said that the ETH / ETC division indicated that minority chains are viable.
"The ETH / ETC division was very healthy for the community," Summerwill said. "The Ethereum community has moved to mainstream adoption, and the Ethereum Classic community has taken control of its own destiny and took the code as they wished.I think the channel division will be healthy for the community. bitcoin for the same reason. "
Splits occur periodically in all open-source communities, said Summerwill. Sometimes there are real differences of opinion and network effects are not enough to keep everyone together, so a group secedes.
"That's how humans work," he said. "It's a beautiful thing."
Rob Viglione, co-founder of ZenCash, a confidentiality piece for borderless and decentralized communications and transactions, takes a similar stance.
"Open-source ecosystems are designed to evolve, whether through improvements in the project or forks in which the entire code base goes in an incompatible direction," said Viglione. "Evolution is a messy process, so it does not always go well, but sometimes it's the only way to have big breakthroughs."
Viglione said that it's not clear that the SHA-256 exchange for Equihash mining is sufficiently value-added to justify a new coin, especially since Zcash already made it last year, but ultimately to the stakeholders.
Can Forks hurt Bitcoin?
Sol Lederer, blockchain director at Loomia, a technology company that creates smart products secured by blockchain technology, has a different vision.
"These forks are very bad for bitcoin," said Lederer. "Saturating the market with different versions of bitcoin is confusing for users, and discredits the statement that there is a limited number of bitcoins – since you can still cram it and double the offer."
Lederer is disturbed by the fact that the fallout stems from a minor debate over how to handle the size limit of blocks.
"Instead of reaching an agreement, the community, the developers and the code are divided into different groups," he said. "We learn that if a blockchain gives you a consensus on a distributed ledger, it does not give you a consensus on the code base, that's what the code to execute." It does not bode well for the company. 39, the future of Bitcoin, where he will be faced with new and bigger challenges requiring further code base upgrades. "
The ranges will continue
Expect more ranges of this type in the future, says Taulant Ramabaja, chief technology officer at ULedger, a blockchain-based solution for data assurance, storage, and storage. Other services. He said that the bitcoin ecosystem has a triangle of three veto powers: 1) minors, 2) trade and 3) portfolios (without key ownership).
"For a fork to become dominant in the future, a sufficiently large portion of the three must jump to the sea," Ramabaja said. "This is highly unlikely, and so bitcoin favors the status quo."
However, once trading and portfolios based on Bitcoin Lightning are put online, this picture may change as the roles of trading and portfolios change, Ramabaja said.
See also: The gold of the fools? The price of gold Bitcoin drops 62% the first day of trading
Forks have gaps
Luis Cuende, co-founder and project manager in Aragon, a decentralized platform for building and managing organizations and businesses, supports the goal of decentralizing Bitcoin as much as possible, but it has problems with Bitcoin Gold as it does not have replay protection, which makes it dangerous for bitcoin users.
Abhishek Pitti, founder and CEO of Nucleus, a sensor technology provider that identifies users and perceives pressure, movement and acceleration, believes that the upcoming SegWit2x fork presents a serious risk to the user. Bitcoin ecosystem due to its lack of backward compatibility. or replay protection, with major developers and exchanges refusing to support it.
"On the other hand, I understand the argument presented in the form of" bitcoin exploitation decentralization "to people using GPUs, rather than the mining scene. ASIC, which has become very centralized, "said Pitti. "Proponents of this idea believe that Bitcoin Gold can help bring mining back to the power of ordinary users."
Image from Shutterstock.