I'm a little ashamed to say that I don't really understand the upcoming Bitcoin fork as well as I should. I suppose since I'm not marathon training, I spend a lot less time listening to podcasts, which are almost always crypto-related.
I appreciate the people on this forum's opinion. It will be deep, and not waxed of with self-serving BS opining.
That said, what does this article mean?
https://medium.com/@jimmysong/segwit2x-game-theory-scenarios-part-1-7f863904a72It looks like the focus of the article is surrounding the implications for miners, block times, price and profitability. The bigger issue to me is what will emerge as the new bitcoin and how will people keep everything straight.
For the sake of clarification, let's call what we know as bitcoin / BTC today as B1X and Segwit 2mb as B2X.
At block 494784, if B2X is supported by more than 80% network it will be activated. Estimated Nov 15. If it does, and all signs point to it being activated, from there as long as people are mining both chains with enough hashing power for it not to be abandoned before the next difficulty retarget, which is again highly likely, and we will have 2 again versions of bitcoin.
So what the article was addressing mostly is how the difficulty mining either chain will be higher. B1X cannot adjust itself quickly to a massive change in miners, so until the next difficulty retarget, it will likely take a lot longer for new blocks to be mined, if 10% of miners are still mining B1X, it will take them 10 times longer to solve a block. B2X will start with the same difficulty as Bitcoin, so if it maintains the majority of the hashrate it will have much faster blocks, but not 10 minute blocks, if they have 90% of the network it will take roughly 11 minutes to find the next block.
Now, onto the bigger issue to me topic...
What is the new bitcoin / BTC? If you owned an exchange, you would have to make a decision. You could call B2X bitcoin / BTC, and relabel B1X. Or you could call B1X bitcoin / BTC, and call B2X something else, like B2X.
How will the regular people be able to keep track of all this, what exchanges are calling what BTC / bitcoin, and are all exchanges on the same page.
Disclaimer: There are many possibilities and no one can predict what will happen exactly, this is only my best estimation of the information I have available to me.