Bitcoin’s antifragility in its forked future

Sumanth Neppalli
Jul 30, 2017 · 2 min read
Photo by Alejandro Escamilla on Unsplash

When I first heard about the Bitcoin split, my response was anger and tears that the future of BTC was being destroyed. I was sure that a split would completely undermine the trust people have put in BTC as a currency.

As a newcomer to the BTC world, I was mostly exposed to the core developer’s views and I agreed with them.

Despite the rejoicing of Segwit2x activation, Bitcoin Cash’s developers decided to hard fork on August 1st. As I read different sides of the scaling debate, I chanced upon this argument.

I disagree. A 100%. Only if BTC becomes the primary utility for retail payment will it even be used for all the other revolutionary things. And as a bitcoin user, I have the freedom to take my money and move to a chain whose principles I agree with. Bitcoin gives me that freedom, the freedom which I didn’t have with government dictated money.

The more I thought about the fork in context of Taleb’s Antifragile, I began to understand Fred Wilson’s view.

Forks are a feature, not a bug in the blockchain sector.

Different forks will increase BTC’s innovation. Teams will compete to add features that match with their own vision to their fork. Teams will learn from the mistakes of other fork’s. They will also see what worked and improve their own code base. This co-operation will happen because BTC will always remain open source .

Till today, BTC suffered from centralization of code deployment. Developer teams fought through debate and a central verifying body accepted code changes akin to the government’s legislature. Tomorrow, that ends.

Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile

Tomorrow, the market will assign a value to the new fork. And Bitcoin will demonstrate the beauty of its antifragility yet again.

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