Embrace The Coming Bitcoin Fork (3 of 3)

Why there is good reason to believe a contentious Bitcoin hard fork is coming

1. We live in a de facto forked Bitcoin community today

Here is where we have to be honest with ourselves, we are already living in de facto forked bitcoin communities right now. I won’t rehash all the events that have led to up to this point, but here are the realities today.

A. Major contributors to the bitcoin code base who once worked together have split off and now work in competing bitcoin software development teams.

B. There are now multiple versions of the bitcoin software competing for node adoption and hash power, which could trigger a fork should they gain sufficient adoption.

C. Discussion of Bitcoin has split into separate forums, separate sub reddits, separate mailing lists and so forth. In communications channels there are very literally two different discussions going on in parallel.

D. People at the largest bitcoin exchanges, largest wallet providers, and largest miners in the world are actively and publicly discussing switching bitcoin software and even directly discussing a world where a bitcoin fork is a near term reality.

Bitcoin developers, software versions, and user communications are already split and exchanges, wallets and miners are actively discussing a fork. Its really only a matter of time until a Bitcoin fork happens. The questions remaining are: What date the fork will happen and if it will be triggered by a crisis or planned ahead of time?

2. There is an active community forming around a Bitcoin hard fork

I found out after writing the first two installments of this post, that as of August 2nd 2016 there is a sub Reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/btcfork where users, developers and miners are coordinating their efforts specifically on planning and executing a contentious hard fork of bitcoin. Many folks in this group are participating pseudonymously in order to avoid censorship or attacks from those that would oppose a fork. The sub Reddit has quickly grown to more than 1,000 users and in short order spawned a variety of other channels, a website and is actively working on code to fork Bitcoin.

Regardless of this particular group or its efforts culminate in a near term hard fork, it is clear given the interest seen in the past few months that a segment of the Bitcoin community strongly feels that a hard fork is the best remaining option for improving the Bitcoin Network in the way they believe is required.

3. Ethereum’s Fork Let The Genie Out Of The Bottle

Those in the Bitcoin community that witnessed the Ethereum fork and realized that a majority of mining power isn’t required for a version of the Blockchain to survive with a different vision. This clear evidence from the Ethereum / Ethereum Classic fork event offers data that when a Bitcoin fork happens a similar outcome is likely. I almost can’t imagine a situation in which this won’t happen during the next Bitcoin fork.

The Ethereum team was hoping that no major exchanges would list the separate token on the smaller branch of the Ethereum fork. But when just one exchange broke rank and suddenly listed Ethereum Classic, the token instantly had a market price and a location for miners of the smaller chain to realize the gains from mining on the Ethereum Classic chain. Other exchanges seeing the profits pour in for the one exchange that listed Ethereum Classic first, soon also listed Ethereum Classic and it now enjoys support among many of the largest volume exchanges.

Considering this experience by the exchanges. Its hard to imagine that come a Bitcoin Unlimited / Bitcoin Core fork there will not be at least a few exchanges that quickly add support for both digital tokens. Thus giving both chains a market price and significant resources and incentives for each chain to be maintained.

Conclusion: Forks will happen, keep calm and bitcoin on

In the end of the day I believe we should view forks as another positive tool that exists in the Blockchain ecosystem for solving conflict. Instead of politics and endless in fighting, those in the Bitcoin world have the unique power to peacefully move their value to another chain and continue to voluntarily associate with the project they believe has the greatest merit.

This fact should be embraced.