The fate of this fork will be exactly the fate of all attempted forks to date : the savvy Bitcoin holders will sell their fake-Bitcoins on the fake network, while double-spending (and thus invalidating) their sale on the actual network, thereby keeping their actual Bitcoin safe.iv The proceeds of this "victimless"v crime will be used to purchase more legitimate Bitcoins on the legitimate network, thus draining away value from the holders of Bitcoin fakes, into the pockets of the legitimate Bitcoin holders.
Could Bitmain be positioning themselves now by offering the Bitcoin Cash fork (which presumably they know will fail to achieve the status of the true Bitcoin) so they will plausibly have an excuse to go back to mining TRB after the 2MB plan of the New York Agreement fails to materialize. I see possibly Bitmain is playing a very clever political game here to position themselves. And remember Bitmain retains also the AsciiBoost weapon which they can activate to hypothetically increase their hashrate by ~30%.
However there is an alternative scenario in that Bitmain et al might entirely ignore TRB and so a smaller miner such as perhaps Craig Wright’s claimed 20% share of network hashrate might take the risk to start “stealing” the SegWit transactions on and by mining TRB. As time goes on, it becomes more difficult for even Bitmain to orphan those older blocks as the amount of proof-of-work difficulty on the longest chain accumulates over time. The Bitcoin million BTC kingpin Mircea Popescu and others who are astute will be selling their BTC on the Core fork (as I explained how to do) and buying TRB somehow (will Craig Wright be providing an exchange?). This will continue to raise the hashrate of TRB relative to the Core fork.
A third and perhaps less likely scenario is that a sufficiently powerful player such as Bitmain could periodically swoop in driving hashrate of TRB up, orphaning recent blocks to steal back more SegWit (and any replayed Core transactions that were paid by Bitmain or proxies/allies), and then appear to leave only to come back again. This might be done to attack confidence in TRB and Core/SegWit in order to make the Bitcoin Cash fork look more relatively stable.
I anticipate the vast majority (if not all) of the news during August should be about the successful activation of SegWit and the euphoria of finally getting some scaling moving forward on Bitcoin. As well, the inability of Bitcoin Cash to dominate thus leading to more confidence in a victory of the New York Agreement. Thus I expect a blow off top in the BTC price perhaps even north of $4000. Not sure if we will get a waterfall crash after that peak or just a Fibonacci pullback, perhaps the latter if TRB has not kicked into high gear yet. It is also possible that Bitcoin Cash (BCC) has more initial success than I expect, and thus we might see instead of a moderation of the BTC and BCC prices, but perhaps the sum of the two $4000+.
Then as SegWit usage increases with adoption of Lightning Networks, the carrot for “stealing” SegWit on TRB increases until it (not if it) happens.
Unfortunately I think when this plays out fully, then we will see a waterfall crash in the cryptocurrency prices, because it will obliterate confidence in Bitcoin for perhaps up to a year or so (maybe only 6 months but I doubt it because it will be so shocking to everyone that Core was never really Bitcoin). Everyone will think that TRB is about theft and that cryptocurrency can never be trusted (when in fact it is Core that is enabling the loss of Bitcoins). The majority will be fearful as they see the price of Core BTC collapsing and they will fear to hold any cryptocurrency. Remember what Mt. Gox’s collapse did to Bitcoin (and altcoins) after crashed from over $1000+ in 2013.
*TRB
http://thebitcoin.foundation/index.htmlEDIT: TRB will accept SegWit blocks but SegWit transactions are spendable by anyone! I sourced that link on Trilema. I verified that Satoshi’s Bitcoin indeed enables anyone to spend P2SH.
http://btcbase.org/log/2017-07-18#1685847BTC spent with a SegWit transaction will be stolen by the first miner who can put a spend transaction in a block of the TRB (legacy Bitcoin) chain.
https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/9678/what-is-script-hash-address-exactly-and-how-does-it-work/answer-40730#answer-40730It appears that any HF will only begin once there are recognizable SegWit transactions in a block, which the Real Bitcoin will refuse to mine on. Note I read that the format of a SegWit transaction is such that it can’t be detected until it is spent.
So it appears to me we will get a significant rise in the BTC price after August 1 (perhaps to $4000+?) which will be pushed by the enthusiasm about the hashrate support for SegWit and perhaps also people selling BCC to buy BTC creating more buying demand.
And then August 23 or so, I expect the SegWit chain to fork off from the minority hashrate Real Bitcoin one, and Bitcoin kingpin Mircea Popescu will begin selling the SegWit BTC and buying the Real BTC gradually driving the price of the former down and the latter up and then the hashrate will gradually switch over as well. Charlie Shrem (@charlieshrem) is mocking Mircea Popescu’s statement, “As far as anyone will be able to perceive, miners simply left”.
Afaik, to spend your BTC on the SegWit fork so that it can not be replayed on the legacy Bitcoin will require either mixing with some transactions from blocks that derived from a block containing a SegWit transaction, but (this probably does not scale well and) these can not begin until August 23. Before then, the other way is to attempt to double-spend to yourself on the SegWit fork and legacy Bitcoin over and over until it happens. You’ll need to import your private keys into separate wallets for each fork.
Note we might see altcoins initially dropped as BTC is rising, then the altcoins may catch up. As the HF chaos hits August 23 or so, we might see LTC skyrocket as the community realizes SegWit is dead on Bitcoin and Litecoin already has SegWit. Especially if BCC is defeated so that Jihan Wu (Bitmain) only has Litecoin remaining as their main scaling solution altcoin.
But we might see a collapse in all crypto perhaps after moving up to a peak before everyone realizes SegWit is fucked. Another crypto winter may be upon us after this blow off top ends with theft of the SegWit transactions.
EDIT:
What's your time frame for that?
Difficult to say how long after Aug 23 it will take for there to be enough SegWit transactions to steal, so that miners break away from SegWit chain and mine on real bitcoin chain.
