Bitcoin Forked Up Again : Really? Bitcoin Diamond? What?
Its disappointing but greed never ceases to amaze me! We've got the original one BTC... and the cash one BCC... and the gold one BTG... and now BTC WTF oh sorry, I mean BCD (Bitcoin Diamond). The Bitcoin community was shocked this morning to learn that another hard fork of the network had taken place... Its called Bitcoin Diamond (BCD). More magic money appearing out of nowhere!
Continuing an accelerating trend, BCD developers announced the coin had successfully forked at block 495866, with support from “28 global exchanges.”
Sounds like an inside job to me! What did it take to get 28 global exchanges to get on board? I'd say a piece of the profits if I had to guess but who knows...
BCD’s abrupt entry into the market comes less than two weeks after Bitcoin Gold (BTG) released trading, with the earlier forked Bitcoin Cash (BCH) even hard forking itself during the same period.
There are thus up to five Bitcoin chains in existence as of November 24, despite little being known about the identity, robustness and ultimate long-term support for BTG, BCD and the BCH so-called “malicious” hard fork ‘Bitcoin Clashic.’
I've got to say that if these guys don't stop forking BTC, everything is going to be all forked up. Forever...
Here's how the developers / forkers describe their new forked BCD
[Bitcoin Diamond] Is a decentralized P2P Network designed for bitcoin users this is not just PoW but it runs on Proof Of Stake with 100% Interest every year. You don’t need to worry about coins running out since there are 4.2 billion Total supply to handle inflation and since there are only 10,000 Total blocks to be mined in PoW there wont (sic) be anymore coins existing in Proof Of Work and thereafter the coin will work into Proof Of Stake As this is the official launch of Bitcoin Diamond. We aim to keep the community happy and help to bring some better value for the coin.
Interesting new features... Part of the appeal of BTC used to be the fact that it was considered to be similar to gold. This deviation is far from that with one hundred percent interest per year and proof of stake it does sound quite interesting but I'm not sure if people will buy this use case or not?
While BCD is yet to appear on data collection resource Coinmarketcap, it appears nonetheless poised to follow BTG in dispelling naysayers and becoming a hotly-traded altcoin.
BTG has risen over 40% over the past 24 hours, passing $400 as investors wait to see if $526 all-time highs will be challenged.
I've got to say that none of these clones (except for BCC) have impressed me a single bit. I think they will all suffer a terrible fate and at best there is some quick pump and dump money to be made.
But who knows? Let the market decide what to do right? What are your thoughts about this new BCD? Will it succeed or die a terrible fate?
Source:
Another Day, Another ‘Bitcoin’: Diamond Launches As Gold Passes $400 - Bitcoinist
The Bitcoin Cash fanclub believes both Bitcoin Gold and Bitcoin Diamond is nothing but attempts on "dilluting" the Bitcoin Cash "trademark".
Yeah isnt that the pot calling the kettle black?
BCH does nothing to solve the challenges that BTC has with scaling contrary to what their fan club says.
At the end of the day, Bitcoin is BTC to the average investor which means that will get Wall Street money. As for the "money" aspect of things, it is unlikely that the bitcoin chain will end up being that.
BTC does not have any scaling challenges as of today, but it does have a huge problem with a hard-coded capacity limit.
Actually, it does solve the quadratic hashing problem - for 100% of the new transactions, while Segwit only solves it for the ~10-12% of the bitcoin transactions using the segwit format.
The network effect is extremely important, and the brand name too ... those are the two major reasons why Bitcoin has a higher value than other alts, hence I'm against the forkings. At the other hand, from my point of view, Bitcoin is a dead end by now, the user experience is horrible due to the capacity limit, and there is no longer any hope to get that lifted - it's mostly valuable now as a speculative asset class - aka "digital tulips". To preserve cryptocurrency we need some other coin to take over its role.
Here is my take on the forks:
Do you really think Bitcoin cash will overtake Bitcoin in value? If so, would the value of Bitcoin Cash erode the value of Bitcoin or can the two grow together, long term?
It's hard to predict the future. I'm fairly convinced that Bitcoin will be dethroned as the number one crypto at some point. If it is Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum or something completely different taking over is hard to predict. I'm also fairly convinced that the current Bitcoin market price is in for a huge correction at some point in the future. At the other hand, I've been saying so since last year, and meanwhile the value has risen with 8x ... it could very well be that we'll see another year pass by and another 8x increase in value before the correction. I remain convinced that the correction is inevitable, and when the correction comes it will hurt for all crypto, not only Bitcoin.
Forking bitcoin doesn't create "free money" any more than creating a new altcoin does. If it brings value (or the market thinks it is valuable) it creates new value in the market. If it does not bring value, it would be worthless. Same goes for any new altcoin. If people want to buy it, it will create value. If people do not buy it, it will have no value.
Obviously, people see some sort of value (or potential value) in the forks, otherwise they would be worthless.
No free money, just access to free coins that may or may not have any value.
Also, forking in open source projects is completely normal, natural, and encouraged! It helps us to discover the best projects without having to reinvent the wheel.
Thanks for the post!
The word "fork" has been quite much overloaded, I'm afraid. I even wrote my own article explaining the different usages of the word "fork".
Long-lasting forks are generally not encouraged (Github forks are to some extent encouraged - but in my vocabulary a software fork is something bigger than a github fork). In general best practice is to use the free software, praise the maintainers (who often is doing the maintainer work partly or fully on a volunteer basis), contribute back useful changesets and cooperate with the maintainers to get it incorporated. As a result the software package gets better, it gets more users, bigger network effect and everything is fine.
Software forks are useful when there are big disagreements with the maintainers, i.e. over the direction. Sometimes a "fork" is a way to get rid of bad maintainers who are blocking progress (X.Org is an example of a successful fork, with XFree86 being the incumbent now abandoned project).
What we're seeing with Bitcoin is that it's much more of a protocol than a software project. I think I've never heard the "fork"-word being used on protocols before - and I think it's totally weird to use the word "soft fork" and "hard fork" on protocol upgrades.
A failed protocol upgrade, or a big disagreement on the protocol upgrades will eventually lead to a long-lasting chain fork, which also means a coin fork. In the Bitcoin Cash case it was a planned, "clean" fork. Apparently both sides of the Bitcoin community grew more optimistic after the fork (putting more fiat into crypto), or there wouldn't be any "free money" with it.
In general protocol forks is a bad thing. One should stick to established protocols and standards as much as possible, and when it's needed to upgrade the standards or protocols, it's really best to get as many as possible on-board, agree on it, compromise if needed, do whatever is needed to keep one standard from becoming two. There are several flaws with the original Bitcoin protocol, and unfortunately no agreement on how to deal with them - and there seems to be no will at all for a compromise, it's "my way or the high way", the schism is incredibly toxic and very unfortunate.
What would be nice is to have some big crypto conference where all the most influencing actors are present, and where people would not be allowed to leave until one has agreed to support one and only one functional working crypto currency protocol ... a bit like the papal elections. Hm, wait ... I guess one tried that in Hong Kong and it was a failure as central actors defected the agreement as soon as they got out from the meeting room.
Thanks for your great reply! I think you're right, we should try to work together to create a stronger project instead of splitting up all the time. I think where I'm coming from is that I like to have lots of options with good competition in case the one idea turns out to be a bad one. I have almost lost faith in BTC at this point and I don't know if any of these forks are a good answer, but I'm glad to have the options now so that we can still have the amazing technology that BTC has brought us.
In general, competition is good ... but not always, and usually one does not want competition on standards - rather the opposite, it's very often nice if competitors follows the same standards as that makes it easier to replace a unit. As a small example, USB has become the norm for power delivery to almost all cellphones (at least here in the Europe - thanks to an EU initiative) - it's certainly not the best standard for this purpose, but it's a hell of a lot better than how things used to be - different plugs for every cell phone model almost.
Exceptions does apply though, old or bad standards can become a barrier for innovation - and proprietary de-facto standards can really skew the competition. If 95% of the population is comfortable with receiving and sending Microsoft Office attachments by email, it's very hard for anyone to compete against Microsoft Office (and very hard to be one of the 5% that doesn't like Microsoft Office).
And, we must not forget that cryptocurrency is in competition with fiat, centralized payment solutions and centralized banking systems - and cryptocurrency is the underdog. There are certain principles that most people in the crypto currency community agrees on - and even with the current bitcoin schism ... most people want the same - a strong, useful and decentralized Bitcoin, which side on happens to be on boils more down to whom one believes in more than what features with Bitcoin one thinks is more important.
If we could work together and pull at least partly in the same direction, the credit card duopoly would be history within some few years.
It does not necessary mean the same as scrapping all coins except for one - there may be other levels of cooperation, i.e. ensuring good standards for routing payments from one crypto currency to another (without using a centralized changing service like shapeshift).
Reading through your posts and becoming a bigger fan of yours. Hope you continue to contribute.
What are your thoughts on Industry Cryptocurrencies? For example OPEC or Agricultural/Soft Commodities companies band together to create their own crypto currency, one you can't mine (similar to Ripple), and insist on only being paid in that currency? I think the flexibility to create new currencies with blockchain technology will enable & encourage large corporations and industries to favor cooperation amongst one another other and undermine fiat currencies across the world.
I think it's very likely that we'll get new digital currencies created by industries or states - though, it's not obvious that a trustless, decentralized open blockchain will be favored over a centralized, proprietary, closed, trusted model (and in that case, there are no benefits with a blockchain anymore - it will more likely be some kind of shared database, controlled by one juridical entity).
I think it's utterly important to grow adoption of real crypto currencies as a means of payment, or else I'm quite concerned that we will be forced to use centralized solutions. Physical cash is getting obsoleted quite fast.
As a side note, I'm really concerned with the "digitalization" process here in Norway. On the positive side, one can take up mortages, buy houses, access personal health information, get information from the school, receive "secure" emails from governmental organizations, etc with few mouse clicks - but it's all centralized solutions with commercial entities both having de-facto monopol on the services offered, as well as sitting on all the private keys. I feel very uncomfortable with it, and those companies certainly have found a nice and secure way of siphoning tax money. I'm quite sure that we'd have decentralized solutions now if PGP had become popular among ordinary citizens during the 90s. Similarly, if we ever are to enjoy decentralized payment solutions we need to continue grow adoption and network effect. It's really very sad when the biggest and most well-known crypto currency is having a hard limit on the transaction volume (and hence adoption is efficiently stopped - there can only be more hodlers or indirect Bitcoin owners having their coins on the exchanges - there aren't space for more active users).
My line of thought is that we are already seeing data & analytics companies offering B2B solutions requirr you yo purchase "tokens" (not a blockchain tech) to pay for various services. My day job has me in this space regularly and it is becoming more and more common. I see it as a precursor of industrial trade credits and tokens backed by blockchain.
Thanks! I really appreciate that! I think that if cryptocurrencies survive, that it is very likely that we could see something like that. I have been thinking about how communities could set up their own currencies. I'll probably write a post about it in the next few weeks when I've thought about it some more.
Very well said. I don't think I have anything to add. You about covered it. The hard part now is deciding which standards we should use...
Don't forget, "bringing value", like in "growing market value", it basically means someone thinks it's worth buying it. If someone is buying it, they are also selling other currency bringing down that value. If people are spending fiat buying the new coin because they believe in the project, the value of crypto as such goes up. If people are trading one coin for the other, the value of crypto as such stays constant, it's a null-sum-game.
There is also the usability-value - but don't forget the importance of the network effect. It has become very difficult to use crypto now, with Bitcoin the network fees are too high and/or the reliability is too low, with other cryptos there is a jungle to choose from. I'm suggesting ETH and BCH for my peers, but they respond that they can pay with LTC or XMR :/
I've been an ethereum supporter for quite a long now, even if it has it's weaknesses - I believe it can be really useful, and it has almost the biggest market cap - I should probably spend time learning to program ether contracts instead of writing comments on steemit and reddit ...
Great points! I completely agree. I just am a little annoyed when people say "free money." I think it confuses people.
Whenever new technologies emerge, there will be a huge swelling of people and ideas trying to fill that niche. The next step is the thinning. When new investor money starts to dry up, the money will start to flow to the eventual winning projects and there will be many losing projects. We saw this recently with the dotcom bubble, and I think we are experiencing it again right now. May the best currencies win! :)
Fwiw, I'm glad you're writing comments on steemit. :)
Agreed. Tobixen adds considerable value to these discussions.
In terms of "may the best coin win" are you diversifying your positions on various coins/tokens much?
Yeah, I have about 15 different coins.
Next up: bitcoin platinum, bitcoin swag, bitcoin bling
Lmao bitcoin swag
Yep! Join the Bitcoin clone fan club... Clone your coins now while the names haven't been taken yet!
We can also go through the Zodiac:
BitcoinAries
BitcoinPisces
BitcoinTaurus
After that, the Greek Gods...
BitcoinZeus anyone?
Planets!
Bitcoin Earth! Bitcoin Mars!
We can argue if Bitcoin Uranus is a cryptocurrency or not later.
I think I saw that advertised at the sex shop.
Dont forget a coin for all seasons....I like BitcoinSpring
What about Bitcoin Tulip?
This is getting confusing. Why not just call them Bitcoin1, Bitcoin2, Bitcion3, ...., Bitcoin 10001 and so on, LOL!
I think the use of "Cash", "Gold" and "Diamond" are more of a branding exercise to create that psychological link between bitcoin and traditional stores of value. While I agree with your sentiments to use numbers, the development community needs to make bitcoin and its derivatives more easily for the layman (non-crypto cavvy people) to understand and associate with value. This will help drive adoption and ultimately increase the use and adoption of bitcoin on a wider scale.
Quite the opposite with "cash", the intention with Bitcoin Cash is to "uphold Satoshis vision of a peer-to-peer digital cash", where cash is something that is changing hand frequently rather than something used for "storing value".
@digitaldruid they are supposed to fix problems from BTC like the slow transaction and high threshold for new members
@Tobixen I definitely understand that forks are meant to be improvements on the existing code. Hard Forks, which leads to a distinct split in the legacy code and the new code. All I'm saying is that there was a marketing element to what the legacy coin (s) would be called, especially if there were multiple splits. Bitcoin Cash -> Bitcoin Gold -> Bitcoin Diamond -> Bitcoin "Infinity Stone" :-P
Forks are good for bitcoin when they actually do a meaningful upgrade. So tired of these bs forks to get a free dividend payout
FORKS is not really a bad thing. Simply because of the nature of BITCOIN, an open source project, the new FORK might just be a better, meaningful upgrade.
Forks go together quite well with spoons and other utensils!
Salad Forks....
Fish Forks....
Dinner Forks....
Dessert Forks....
Oyster Forks.....
We need the Bubba Gump of Cryptocurrency Forks.
Don't forget the pitchforks ... no angry mobs of bitcoiners is complete without pitchforks!
Well played @Tobixen, well played.
Agree, they are trying to make a better version of BTC that has better features
we need a solution to reduce the transaction fees and the confirmation time. and also keep our globe safe and sound.
They are exploiting how the market is behaving right now since there are so many people investing in crypto, they are trying to take as much of the pie as possible.
everyone wants to repeat the success of bitcoin, it never ends, will do it again and again
Most of the people only know about bitcoin, because it has been around for 9 years now, there is a big industry around it. While you can make good money in the short term with altcoins, I see many of them (especially if they are basically copies of BTC) simply disappear in 5/10 years from now.