Topic: The biggest threat to Bitcoin... (Read 2148 times)

I see your worry, but I guess I am more optimist about the collective wisdom of our bitcoin community.  

If such a fork were credibly on the table, it would be televised in advance across the community.  I think in most disputes it would be clear before the first forked-code is downloaded which chain will win.  The miners have an incentive to "make the right choice" from the get go, so we would see all sorts of polls and surveys to help them make their decision.  Mainstream adopters would just get dragged along with the majority, without any real effort or concern on their part.

In the (extremely?) unlikely event that we do have a ~50/50 forks, again I think this would be predicted in advance.  Perhaps people running the web-wallets like Blockchain.info (the wallets the mainstream users use) could simply track the coins on both forks and calculate wallet balance based on the real-time market value of the pre and post fork coins.  Again this would be fairly transparent to the mainstream user.  Somehow, I think market forces would solve the problem very quickly without causing too much pain to the mainstream user.  

how can you validate bitcoins.
they are not moving place only moving adress , they stay the same bitcoin forever.
Result one day all bicoins will be tainted....
so there is no way to pull this of , tecnicaly!
its like the coke traces on dollar bills.

all servailance on bitcoin can be easaly defeated by for example adress filter , coinjoin it can be implemented very easy.
en defeat tracebility and teante reports.
clean bitcoins is just a illusion as the 96% of dollar bills with cocaine traces.
 

The revolution will be compromised.

Honestly i never thought of this issue, but true thats another thing to keep in mind.

True. I think that could be a scenario.

Nevertheless it would definitely damage the mainstream adoption and market valuations of all cryptocurrencies imo.

You are right when you assume that the valuations will go for chain A and chain B to 50% at first. But also both will loose alot more cause of the overall confusion and trust that was lost to mainstream adopters that werent aware of such things to happen.
If such a incident really occurs and alot of people find themselves in the middle of a nerd-/kiddy-fight with maybe thousands of US-Dollars invested even trust in cryptocurrencies in general will take a HUGE hit. Like beetcoin put it right who gurantees that the next altcoin wont run into such inner-circle-fights again?

It would lead to the insight that cryptocurrencies maybe a good mean to perform value transactions but not a good place to invest wealth.

The loss of net neutrality. That would be awful for bitcoin. 

It's incremental improvement, and as people's comfort level with instantly dropping one currency for another grows, the quality of the viable products grows, just as with any other product.  After all, the unique selling proposition of cryptocurrency is freedom from state control.  No reason why we shouldn't approach that ideal asymptotically.

nods...yes it's the natural corse of markets... interventionism ( in this case authorities attempting to manipulate coins ) will create distortions that will eventually be worked out by market dynamics.

I am so glad that people are realizing this.  BTC, as it is now, including its guiding powers, is very flawed.  Up to this point, anyone who criticized it has been shouted down by those who have become, or are fixated on becoming, "bitcoin millionaires".

A hardfork is in the future, between those who actually GET what a non-government controlled cryptocurrency is about (and I don't include Hearn or Andreson in that camp) and those who do.  

Let's get on with it.  Let's leave the grovelling, greedy statists behind.  

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOf5MeK_N18

The Goldcoin community is aware of these dire revelations and will take all necessary steps to ensure that our currency remains true to the free and independent ideals established by Satoshi. A coin is a coin and if you have one it will always be "as good as gold".

One word: KILLS.

http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/MURDER.HTM

Let's pontificate on the dynamics of "forking":


At time t = t1 the network hashing power forks 50/50 into two competing chains, A and B (due to the high-level development dispute that the OP alluded to).  Let's also assume that it is not clear which chain is "better": to most users it's six-of-one, half-a-dozen of the other.

Ok, so Chains A and B are buzzing happily along for a while....(let's assume we are in a temporarily-stable state)

Someone wants to send me a payment.  I am worried because I don't know which chain I prefer, but I do know that pre-fork coins can be spent on either chain while post-fork coins can only be spent on the chain they were mined on.  So, I would probably insist that anyone sending me money must transmit the payment to *both* chains.  

So this strategy works out for a while until I encounter someone who has coins the are valid *only* on Chain A.  In this case I think I have no choice but to accept these coins at a discount.  Since both A and B look "equal," the logical discount is 50%, at first, but eventually a free market will emerge that values post-fork Chain A and post-fork Chain B coins differently.

Now here is what I think will always collapse the fork.  Eventually, for some reason the market value of one of the chains will be greater than the other.  Say that Chain B coins start trading at only a 40% discount.  If this is the case, the miner's mining on Chain A would make more profit by switching to Chain B.  So profit-motivated miner's start moving over until the network hash rate on Chain B is such that it is no longer profitable for the new miners to switch.  

But everyone can see that Chain B appears to be winning, so people want Chain B coins even more and they start trading now at only a 30% discount.  More miners jump ship and the process repeats itself.  Eventually one chain is completely dead and the other is "bitcoin."


Does this sound reasonable?



TLDR: I think the forking dynamics result in an unstable equilibrium such that one chain eventually becomes dominant.  

i'm not sure what that would really do. it'd just roll the ball forward, setting things up to re-occur again. if you invest in an alt cryptocurrency, and it grows into the mainstream again, the same shit would happen. humans would corrupt it.

100% agree.

Anyone whom believes a "hardfork" isn't in our future (ie, the creation of a legitimate trackable Bitcoin and a illegitimate untraceable) needs to re-consider their opinion.

Not that I'm for one of the other, and there are very smart people on both sides of the fence.

Very well said.   The obviously greed-motivated territorial hostility towards alts has to stop.  What is going to protect you when the insiders at the Bitcoin Foundation sell bitcoin out?  Are you going to start your own foundation?  Going to fork bitcoin?  

Obviously, the answer for the regular non-cryptowizardprogrammer is "No".  You have NO POWER, except to switch to another product, in other words, an altcoin which has not been sold out, and it's very easy to do so, just use one of the exchanges, sell BTC, buy LTC, or whatever.  It's the ONLY POWER, as a consumer, that you have.

True, new or already working altcoins could function as a "blow-off-vent" for different approaches.

Nevertheless imo its a very real threat.

Four words "i dont think so"

 

One word "Government"

I just posted this in another topic:


So I hope the threat of alts will give the btc dev team the kick up the arse they need to avoid any mexican standoff type situations.