Formerly an Obscure Bitcoin Function, Fork Discussion Now Dominates Conversation in the community. From Bitcoin Cash to Bitcoin Gold in SegWit2x, forks have abounded lately. Cointelegraph wrote on the forks before, what they mean and their consequences. We have now had the opportunity to talk to a number of other industry leaders about their prospects. Here is what we learned.
Bad news for Bitcoin
Sol Lederer, Blockchain Director of LOOMIA, thinks the forks are dangerous. He writes:
"These forks are very bad for Bitcoin, we are looking at a possible fork on October 25th with Bitcoin Gold and another for 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 still stuff it and double the supply. "
Worse, Lederer According to him, the inability to reach consensus raises issues:
"What is deeply embarrassing is that these fallout stem from a relatively minor feud in the Bitcoin community on how to manage the blocking limit Instead of reaching an agreement, the community, the developers and the code are divided into different groups.We learn that even if a blockchain gives you a consensus on a Distributed edger, it does not provide you with consensus on the code base, that is what code to execute. This does not bode well for the future of Bitcoin, where it will face new, larger challenges requiring further upgrades. "
Nucleus founder and CEO Abhishek Pitti points to SegWit2x's lack of protection as potentially devastating Replay protection prevents attackers from spreading the same transaction across two networks , thus moving the coins and split pieces of a user.Since SegWit2x considers itself the "true" bitcoin, they do not implement such protection.
Pitti writes:
"In the world of cryptocurrency, the ranges are analogous to the underlying technologies. Bitcoin has been designed to serve as an open, trust-free, independent and unauthorized protocol, and the long-term success of Bitcoin depends on maintaining these characteristics. On August 1, 2017, the SegWit flexible fork was deployed, which aimed to address the scalability of the Bitcoin protocol, and offered several key benefits. However, the upcoming SegWit2x fork presents a serious risk to the Bitcoin ecosystem due to its lack of backward compatibility or replay protection, with all major developers and exchanges refusing to support it.
They are Anyway,
Rob Viglione, co-founder of ZenCash, thinks that the ranges are messy but inevitable:
" Open-source ecosystems are designed to evolve, whether through improvements in the project or ranges in which the entire code base goes in an incompatible direction. Evolution is a messy process, so it does not always turn well, but sometimes it's the only way to have big breakthroughs. "
Taulant Ramabaja, CTO of ULedger, thinks that the forks are inevitable and that there will be others to come:
" One can expect a lot more bitcoin forks in the future. In the end the Bitcoin ecosystem has a triangle of three veto powers. 1) minors, 2) trade, 3) portfolios (without key ownership). For a fork to become dominant in the future, a sufficiently large part of the three must jump. That said, Bitcoin favors the status quo
That said, once the Bitcoin Lightning exchanges and portfolios are put online, this picture may change dramatically as the role of exchanges and portfolios changes. . "
Forks Are Good
Bob Summerwill, Chief Blockchain Developer at Sweetbridge, thinks forks are generally a good thing because they allow community members to take the control of their own destiny He writes:
"There have been years of fear, uncertainty and doubt within the Bitcoin community about the" risk "of the forks hard. It seems to me that most of this noise comes from groups that favor coercion and censorship in free markets and the right to secede.
There is no "wrong fork". I have to encourage one team or the other. The experimentation and the competition are good. Let the market decide and participate where you see value.
My most valuable learning experience of the ETH / ETC split was that minority chains are viable. If a crypto community has irreconcilable differences, then you can separate, and that's fine. You get a divorce and both advance with your lives, rather than living together in misery forever, constantly arguing.
Bitcoin Gold
Luis Cuende, Co-Founder of Aragon, was clear on his belief that the recent Bitcoin Gold fork is not a promising solution :
"I like the ultimate goal of decentralizing the currency as much as possible, but Bitcoin Gold does not seem to be a technically sound answer at all. At the moment, it does not even have any protection against repetition, making the fork absolutely careless and extremely dangerous for all Bitcoin users. "
Deaths and Taxes
Ben Franklin famously said that nothing is certain in life, but death and taxes.When it is from Blockchain, we can add a third item to this list: the forks.While Bitcoin is moving towards mainstream adoption and that other digital currencies are beginning to spread equally, it is inevitable that large Decentralized communities supporting these currencies have disagreements.
During the Second World War, the British Ministry of Information encouraged the British to "keep their cool and continue". Is this also a good tip for digital currency enthusiasts? Maybe it's better if we simply ignore the opponents, choose our favorite motto (or fork) and go about our business.