Companies that wanted to raise money to develop their projects in cryptoworld were doing so traditionally with Initial Coin Offerings. Now, another trend has emerged for those who want to do it – the hard fork
Not strictly a fork
A fork, in its strictest sense, implies a change in the protocol of a cryptocurrency resulting in an old version and a new version. Developers who fork a cryptocurrency have no real monetary benefit, as they only implement a protocol change. Holders of the original cryptocurrency (eg Bitcoin) keep coins on both branches and can spend them as they please.
This was true in the case of Bitcoin Cash – a real fork of Bitcoin with larger blocks. While the developers increased the size of the blocks, they did not benefit financially from the creation of Bitcoin Cash. However, other forks like Bitcoin Gold have a premix element included. The developers start with the Bitcoin blockchain at some point, but exploit a number of blocks for themselves.
Benefits – Established User Base
The advantages of making a division of an existing cryptocurrency is that you inherit a base of established users. Users have nothing to do to claim their parts. This can be a two-edged sword if these users decide to throw their "free" pieces. For developers interested in collecting money through a combination of premine and fork, this can be a disaster. The price of their mined coins would go to zero. For pure ideological forks, this does not matter. The market determines the relative value of their coins and then proceeds to promote it
Regulators should have few problems
ICOs have been attacked by regulators around the world. without any warranty in place. Given that hard forks are in fact a free distribution of chips, regulators should be more accommodating. Of course, investors can still lose money when they buy these coins during trading and then prices fall apart.
Regulators would be more worried about flying operators who collect money via ICOs and disappear. The SEC took action against several ICOs, arguing that their chips were securities. Other countries like South Korea have also severely regulated ICOs, while leaving cryptocurrency trading alone.
The Many Faces of Bitcoin
When you have the choice to cram a cryptocurrency, one with the largest user base and the largest market capitalization. The success of Bitcoin Cash has spawned many new imitators – Bitcoin Gold, Bitcoin Silver, Bitcoin Diamond and Super Bitcoin. Imitation might be the best form of flattery, but Bitcoin certainly does not need so many forks. The problem will only get worse if the price of Bitcoin increases and imitators seek to benefit more from the brand "Bitcoin".
Sol Lederer, Blockchain Director at LOOMIA, agrees:
"These forks are very bad for Bitcoin.We are considering a possible fork on October 25th with Bitcoin Gold and another next month for SegWit2x.To saturate the market with different versions of Bitcoin is confusing for users and discredits the assertion that there is a limited number of Bitcoins – since you can always fork it and double it. Offer. "