What Is Bitcoin Cash and How Will the Fork Affect You?
[26 July 2017] Cryptocurrency News:
Never a dull day in the CryptoCurrency Universe. Just when you thought the Bitcoin drama was over and price was going up…. We now hear that Bitmain, one of the biggest player in Bitcoin mining has turned around from his initial support of BIP91 and has now claimed that he and other old guards are going ahead with a hard fork, effectively producing their own set of Bitcoin offshoot called Bitcoin Cash.
While it may seem like Bitmain is the big bad guy who doesn’t want to play nice with the rest of the community, the story that I read and understood was that the latest SegWit proposition goes against the road map that Bitcoin founder Satoshi Nakamoto has laid down. A hardfork to Bitcoin Cash, I feel is the only way to move forward with Bitcoin’s original plans because a compromise is just not favourable to either side.
And as I suspected, some people who are savvy with the blockchain technology has said that the demand for a fork has more to do with politics than tech restrictions. I tried to understand what they mean but the numbers were giving me a headache.
In a nutshell, Bitcoin Cash is Nakamoto’s original plan — decentralized electronic cash for the internet. Bitcoin Core, or just Bitcoin for short, favours a more centralized way of transaction similar to our current financial system with the banks.
For the common users, you guys probably won’t care much about how things work as long as it’s fast and cheap. The future is yet to be seen on this one, but at least we now know that Nakamoto’s original plan is going to live on and in time to come, we can see which way is indeed better. However, the one beautiful thing about this fork is that if any of you guys currently hold Bitcoins to your name, you will effectively have doubled your money. When a fork happens, your coins are duplicated. You don’t have to do anything. After August 1st, you would have both the existing Bitcoin (BTC) and Bitcoin Cash (BCC) for free. It’s safe and would not rollback causing you to lose your Bitcoin.
All this drama and what you really need to know is that for the average Bitcoin holders, it’s a good thing. Personally, I feel this sort of brazen, almost scam-like manoeuvre, should be deemed illegal. How anyone can let this happen surprises me, though I guess I should have come to realise that when it comes to printing money, the world has the uncanny ability to turn a blind eye.
The amazing world of money and cryptocurrency.
If you’re interested in the history of this conflict, there’s an article here that makes for a quite a good read to help you make sense of how the origin of this disagreement.
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Originally published at www.eugenetay.com.
