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the ownership of cryptocurrency is based on a cryptographically signed ledger. Today, everybody agrees who owns which bitcoin because everyone agrees on the rul
by appleflaxen 9y ago
the ownership of cryptocurrency is based on a cryptographically signed ledger. Today, everybody agrees who owns which bitcoin because everyone agrees on the rules of transfer.
When you change the rules of transfer in a subset of nodes/users, then all of a sudden there is disagreement about who owns what: there are two ledgers, and you look at the one whose opinion about "ownership" you agree with.
So the "fork" is a fork in ownership or truth: a difference of opinion about who owns what. Nothing more, nothing less.
But it's a complicated economic effect to predict, because it's likely that the losing side (the opinion with the smaller number of nodes supporting it) will wither and die - one major value proposition of bitcoin is that it's universal. But what happens to the people who used that losing fork in the interim? Well, basically none of their transactions were "real" (they didn't take place on the ledger that eventually won), and if you sold something to someone on that ledger, then they have the goods/services, and you have nothing.
- splitbrain 9y agoSo, as long as I hold on to the bitcoins I bought before all this madness started I should be safe? Like when in a few years some fork is the declared winner, I can still just sell my bitcoins on that winner network? (assuming bitcoins will be worth anything after those shenanigans).
- krallja 9y agoDepends how you are holding bitcoins. On another thread, it appeared that Coinbase might be doing something sketchy in the case of certain kinds of forks. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14806636 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14806636
- splitbrain 9y agoI'm holding them in a wallet.dat file of the original bitcoin (full node) client that I haven't started in maybe a year or more. More or less a completely offline stash.
- TheCoreh 9y agoSo you should be safe. Wait for the fork to happen and end, update the client to the "winner" side of the fork, and you'll be able to do transactions normally. What might happen is the coins might lose some market value in the short term due to the hysteria surrounding the fork.
- splitbrain 9y agothanks for the clarification. much appreciated!
- supergreg 9y ago> update the client to the "winner" side of the fork But will the bitcoin client (from bitcoin.org) update to the winning rules or will I need to download it from somewhere else depending on who the winner is?