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Yeah, while I agree that the 2013 fork could have resulted in significantly more lost money than it did, I'm far from convinced that it would have proved catast
by jnbiche 11y ago
Yeah, while I agree that the 2013 fork could have resulted in significantly more lost money than it did, I'm far from convinced that it would have proved catastrophic for Bitcoin. For one thing, the idea that a Bitcoin fork would be likely to endure for anything other than ideological reasons is pretty far-fetched. There are strong incentives for miners to be on the same side of a fork as the economic majority, and vice versa.
Now, in the case of a major ideological disagreement, as this block size debate has (suprisingly) turned into, I could see a lasting fork happening to the Bitcoin ecosystem. But back in 2013, there were no such major disagreements, just a bunch of minor squabbles.
So yes, it could have been worse, but not that much worse.
- erikpukinskis 11y agoWhat damage do you think would've happened? I am honestly confused as to why people are so afraid of a fork. If there is a fork, it just means that people have to decide which branch they believe in. They might even get different names. If you have coins on both forks, you can spend both coins. In practice, the total market cap of the two forks should approximate the market cap of the original, which means your coins didn't lose any value. And in practice, whichever fork has more mindshare will probably win, not because of any technical reason, but because that's the one people are paying attention to so that's the one that seems safer to mine on. Heck, if there really were a long-lived fork, people could just require people who want to spend pre-fork coins to send the coins on both forks before they consider the bill "paid". How bad exactly do you think it could've gotten, in the worst case scenario? To me, the beauty of Bitcoin is that the worst case scenario just isn't that bad.