8 ms·

Bitcoin Cash Starts Trading

123 points by Andrew_Quentin 9y ago

cjnicholls 9y ago
way back link: https://web.archive.org/web/20170722175223/http://www.trustnodes.com/2017/07/22/bitcoin-cash-starts-trading-reaches-high-nearly-900 https://web.archive.org/web/20170722175223/http://www.trustn...
saurik 9y ago
https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/6hko7c/viabtc_will_allow_you_to_trade_your_segwit_coins/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/6hko7c/viabtc_will... ^ Here is some information (mostly in the form of a fragment of a video, but also to a much much lesser extent some comments) on what seems to be earlier versions of this plan, which I found useful for context (though I haven't spent the time to work this all out in my head yet...).
TD-Linux 9y ago
For those unaware, "Bitcoin Cash" is a proposed future fork of Bitcoin. The primary miner supporting it also runs an exchange, so what they are effectively trading is "future promised coins" once they start actually mining the fork. Because so few of % of the total coins are tradeable, I think this results in a similarly volatile "market cap" as many ICOs.
- jeppebemad 9y ago
  Thank you. I was about to ask for a clarification on the below statement from the article, but that now makes sense. "At that point, anyone who currently has bitcoin gains the same amount of BCC, while retaining their BTC."
  - runeks 9y ago
    > "At that point, anyone who currently has bitcoin gains the same amount of BCC, while retaining their BTC." This is quite important, because it means that all Bitcoin holders effectively are given BCC for free, which they can sell on an exchange. Thus, the BCC market risks an immense flood of BCC sellers who very suddenly earned a tidy profit out of nowhere, which could crash the BCC price completely, because the market is so shallow, relative to the BTC markets. In fact, I think this is quite likely to end up being the death of BCC: a constant sell-pressure from BTC-cum-BCC holders, who just want to cash out in dollars. This can end up forcing market makers out of the BCCUSD market, because they can't risk holding too much BCC with a constant sell-pressure like that. The BTCUSD market has grown from a small stream to a small river and, when the BCCUSD market opens in earnest, this small BTCUSD river will be connected to the tiny stream that is the freshly born BCCUSD market.
eterm 9y ago
Is there a crypto voting ring? I understand why most crypto articles reach the top 10 posts but this one has nothing going for it. * Niche website linked / breaking the news * Non-mainstream crypto-fork * No novel interest / features There's nothing to suggest why this would be upvoted, even among this crypto-friendly crowd.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- thinbeige 9y ago
  I think that crypto news are still underrepresented on HN. The recent crypto topics (such as ICOs, Solidity, Tezos, EOS, ETH's Parity which is btw written in Rust) surge in word-wide traffic outperforming last year trends (AI, bots, VR) by far. I hunt for respective news on other sites because HN just provides the most important crypto news. There's a lot more out there, it's new and complex. It's good to read stuff multiple times from different sources to get familiar with this new world order.
  - SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
    ....Just to double-check, you're serious right?
    - thinbeige 9y ago
      Yes, I am. There's also a lot of scam out there, almost every ICO feels like scam, but still. The more serious stuff catches such a huge attention, just the ecosystem around ETH got so big and mature (despite some recent exploits) that it's hard to ignore this space. Just compare: not just few projects raised funds within days a startup would take months. If this is the future? IDK. But I know it's 10x better than how fundraising was before. And this is just one part of the crypto space.
      - SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
        I'm not saying cryptocurrencies aren't interesting, I'm just saying you're overstating their case relative to other technologies and the novelty (eg, that it even is novel, as opposed to normal engineering on top of ideas that have been around decades) in saying that it's underrepresented. (Also, AI and bots are the same topic, but that's a tangent.) I would argue we should hear about them less than automated truck driving specifically, based on potential economic impact and current spending levels. (Which, actually, seems to be about the trend -- we see small bursts of a few stories a day when a major event happens, but otherwise, it's mostly just a low murmur among other things.)
ZeusNuts 9y ago
I don't think this is a joke, but it should be. Forking a chain will never result in value-added.
- jabgrabdthrow 9y ago
  fuel for the ETH/ETC fire =P
- bdcravens 9y ago
  Litecoin is the oldest fork of Bitcoin, and arguably it adds value (with shorter confirmation times)
  - encryptThrow32 9y ago
    fork in codebase, not fork in chain. mutually exclusive genesis blocks and different proof of work algorithms. Its like its little silver brother!
- meesterdude 9y ago
  Ethereum forked and both have gone up since. I can't say it will always result in a value-add, but certainly never is incorrect.
Artlav 9y ago
That sounds like a massive scam, in it's pumping stage.
- h1d 9y ago
  Find who's behind and you will know it's not a scam. Not that I support such a large block though.
  - Artlav 9y ago
    Yes, the same guys who were behind "Bitcoin XT", "Bitcoin Classic", "Bitcoin Unlimited" and other similar scams. Can't see why this one should be any different.
hudon 9y ago
A fork like Bitcoin Cash will be a boon for the blockchain community. There is a pretty big subset of the community that believe Bitcoin is a panacea that will replace currencies, payment networks and so on, regardless of how technically inferior the blockchain is to other more mature distributed databases and networks. They believe one day, the blockchain will be just as efficient or even more so. This subset is vocal about the urgency of increasing Bitcoin's block size limit so that we can increase transaction throughput as much as possible and as soon as possible. On the other hand, most developers who have worked on Bitcoin proper (either protocol development or Core node development) believe that Bitcoin is more about financial sovereignty and censorship resistance, not as an in-place replacement of PayPal or VISA. This group wants to find as many ways to scale the blockchain without increasing the block size limit because increasing the size of blocks puts at risk users' ability to validate the chain. This is because larger blocks means more resources required to transmit, validate and store blocks and if you cannot validate blocks, then you are trusting transaction validators (miners) just like you trust PayPal. Risking the ability to validate the chain is risking the financial sovereignty or censorship resistance they value so much. Regardless of how well some claim SegWit2x is doing, truth is once SegWit is activated, we still have to face the 2x hard fork which many people in the second camp will simply refuse to support. Having said all this, Bitcoin Cash represents an earnest understanding that there are two camps in Bitcoin and because of the differing economic visions, they will have different technical visions, so why not have two chains and evolve them independently? Rather than playing tug-of-war and both parties being dissatisfied?
- curyous 9y ago
  FYI, a network with 1000x more on-chain transactions, that everyone uses, is much more difficult to censor, than one that requires bank-like organisation with IOUs to the main chain.
  - vertex-four 9y ago
    I am unaware of any current proposal which requires putting in place a bank-like organisation. If you're talking about Lightning Network: routing things across a network without requiring a central controller is a very well-studied field.
encryptThrow32 9y ago
The dangers of tx replay mean that HF's like this can never be safe. Beware those that would tell you that these forks are safe, they are not. This is another scam from those that would try to usurp the blockchain. You will be able to replay original bitcoin and abc tx's on each chain, unless you opt-in to some funny new untesed hash. This will hugely disrupt the minority chain ABC, as the mempools on cash chain fill with other valid tx's from main chain. Its going to be a bloodbath. Steer very clear! From: https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/56867/bitcoin-cash-replay-protection https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/56867/bitcoin-ca... Bitcoin Cash (aka Bitcoin ABC aka UAHF) provides two methods of replay protection, both of which are opt in. If you do not create transactions which use these features, then your transactions are vulnerable to replay. The first method is a redefined sighashing algorithm which is basically the same as the one specified by BIP 143. This sighash algorithm is only used when the sighash flag has bit 6 set. These transactions would be invalid on the non-UAHF chain as the different sighashing algorithm will result in invalid transactions. This means that in order to use this, you will need to transact on the UAHF chain first and then on the non-UAHF chain second. The second method uses an OP_RETURN output which has the exact string: Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System as the data of the OP_RETURN. Any transaction which contains this string will be considered invalid by UAHF nodes until block 530,000. This means that prior to block 530,000, you can split your coins by transacting on the non-UAHF chain first with the OP_RETURN output, and then transacting on the UAHF chain second.
- stale2002 9y ago
  Uhh, protecting your transactions against replay attacks in Hard Fork scenarios like this is a solved problem. There are a multitude of ways to split your coins, so that they are separate, and you don't risk selling the other chain when you don't mean to.
  - encryptThrow32 9y ago
    Solved, maybe, but apparently not in this case as the replay mitigation's are opt-in. What would stop someone replaying a regular tx from core chain if this network accepts either replay protected or not tx's?
SeriousM 9y ago
As a bitcoin newbie, I'm even more confused now as before and I don't know if I should start with bitcoin at all..
- CyberDildonics 9y ago
  Just make sure to read /r/btc and either ignore /r/bitcoin or know that both /r/bitcoin and bitcoin talk are heavily censored and manipulated. Hacker News has some of the same absurdities that pop up, but it isn't as bad. The big question is, do you think 13KB/s AT MOST is too much for your internet connection and computer to handle? Right now it is 1/8th of that, and the /r/bitcoin and 'small blocker' narrative is that anything more is a disaster. Simple math and even slight experience with bitcoin shows that it is exceptionally more likely that this is to create a problem that the company, blockstream, that pays all the gate keepers to the 'core' implementation, can then solve.
  - Frogolocalypse 9y ago
    > do you think 13KB/s AT MOST is too much for your internet connection You've quoted this number many times now, and it is completely incorrect. The upload bandwidth required for a full node with eight peers is an absolute minimum of 0.39mbps/mb of block size. The things you're saying are the kind of things that people who really don't have any clue of the resources required by a node would say. In fact, it's pretty clear you don't run a node, have never run a node, and will never run a node. So your opinion as to the security requirements of bitcoin should be viewed in that context.
    - CyberDildonics 9y ago
      That is what it would take to sync with the chain. > The upload bandwidth required for a full node with eight peers is an absolute minimum of 0.39mbps/mb of block size. That doesn't make any sense, it depends on how many people are downloading from you. By the way, you do realize that millions of people upload and download far more than this from torrents right? How can you even say these things with a straight face, they make no sense. > The things you're saying are the kind of things that people who really don't have any clue of the resources required by a node would say. You keep saying I don't know what I'm talking about, but I run half a dozen unlimited and classic nodes, they cost next to nothing. I run one off my phone with a 256GB micro sd card. Do you really think you can't pay $15 USD per month and run even a single full node? A node doesn't even come REMOTELY close to taking up the resources of the cheapest VPS out there. How can anyone take you seriously when you say things like this?
unabridged 9y ago
If you're going to fork bitcoin it should be to change the algorithm so 5 chip companies don't control the entire mining process.
arisAlexis 9y ago
This is a no go im impressed by the upvotes i think HN community is not well informed on the subject

way back link: https://web.archive.org/web/20170722175223/http://www.trustnodes.com/2017/07/22/bitcoin-cash-starts-trading-reaches-high-nearly-900 https://web.archive.org/web/20170722175223/http://www.trustn...

saurik 9y ago

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/6hko7c/viabtc_will_allow_you_to_trade_your_segwit_coins/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/6hko7c/viabtc_will... ^ Here is some information (mostly in the form of a fragment of a video, but also to a much much lesser extent some comments) on what seems to be earlier versions of this plan, which I found useful for context (though I haven't spent the time to work this all out in my head yet...).

TD-Linux 9y ago

For those unaware, "Bitcoin Cash" is a proposed future fork of Bitcoin. The primary miner supporting it also runs an exchange, so what they are effectively trading is "future promised coins" once they start actually mining the fork. Because so few of % of the total coins are tradeable, I think this results in a similarly volatile "market cap" as many ICOs.

jeppebemad 9y ago
Thank you. I was about to ask for a clarification on the below statement from the article, but that now makes sense. "At that point, anyone who currently has bitcoin gains the same amount of BCC, while retaining their BTC."
- runeks 9y ago
  > "At that point, anyone who currently has bitcoin gains the same amount of BCC, while retaining their BTC." This is quite important, because it means that all Bitcoin holders effectively are given BCC for free, which they can sell on an exchange. Thus, the BCC market risks an immense flood of BCC sellers who very suddenly earned a tidy profit out of nowhere, which could crash the BCC price completely, because the market is so shallow, relative to the BTC markets. In fact, I think this is quite likely to end up being the death of BCC: a constant sell-pressure from BTC-cum-BCC holders, who just want to cash out in dollars. This can end up forcing market makers out of the BCCUSD market, because they can't risk holding too much BCC with a constant sell-pressure like that. The BTCUSD market has grown from a small stream to a small river and, when the BCCUSD market opens in earnest, this small BTCUSD river will be connected to the tiny stream that is the freshly born BCCUSD market.

eterm 9y ago

Is there a crypto voting ring? I understand why most crypto articles reach the top 10 posts but this one has nothing going for it. * Niche website linked / breaking the news * Non-mainstream crypto-fork * No novel interest / features There's nothing to suggest why this would be upvoted, even among this crypto-friendly crowd.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
thinbeige 9y ago
I think that crypto news are still underrepresented on HN. The recent crypto topics (such as ICOs, Solidity, Tezos, EOS, ETH's Parity which is btw written in Rust) surge in word-wide traffic outperforming last year trends (AI, bots, VR) by far. I hunt for respective news on other sites because HN just provides the most important crypto news. There's a lot more out there, it's new and complex. It's good to read stuff multiple times from different sources to get familiar with this new world order.
- SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
  ....Just to double-check, you're serious right?
  - thinbeige 9y ago
    Yes, I am. There's also a lot of scam out there, almost every ICO feels like scam, but still. The more serious stuff catches such a huge attention, just the ecosystem around ETH got so big and mature (despite some recent exploits) that it's hard to ignore this space. Just compare: not just few projects raised funds within days a startup would take months. If this is the future? IDK. But I know it's 10x better than how fundraising was before. And this is just one part of the crypto space.
    - SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
      I'm not saying cryptocurrencies aren't interesting, I'm just saying you're overstating their case relative to other technologies and the novelty (eg, that it even is novel, as opposed to normal engineering on top of ideas that have been around decades) in saying that it's underrepresented. (Also, AI and bots are the same topic, but that's a tangent.) I would argue we should hear about them less than automated truck driving specifically, based on potential economic impact and current spending levels. (Which, actually, seems to be about the trend -- we see small bursts of a few stories a day when a major event happens, but otherwise, it's mostly just a low murmur among other things.)

ZeusNuts 9y ago

I don't think this is a joke, but it should be. Forking a chain will never result in value-added.

jabgrabdthrow 9y ago
fuel for the ETH/ETC fire =P
bdcravens 9y ago
Litecoin is the oldest fork of Bitcoin, and arguably it adds value (with shorter confirmation times)
- encryptThrow32 9y ago
  fork in codebase, not fork in chain. mutually exclusive genesis blocks and different proof of work algorithms. Its like its little silver brother!
meesterdude 9y ago
Ethereum forked and both have gone up since. I can't say it will always result in a value-add, but certainly never is incorrect.

Artlav 9y ago

That sounds like a massive scam, in it's pumping stage.

h1d 9y ago
Find who's behind and you will know it's not a scam. Not that I support such a large block though.
- Artlav 9y ago
  Yes, the same guys who were behind "Bitcoin XT", "Bitcoin Classic", "Bitcoin Unlimited" and other similar scams. Can't see why this one should be any different.

hudon 9y ago

A fork like Bitcoin Cash will be a boon for the blockchain community. There is a pretty big subset of the community that believe Bitcoin is a panacea that will replace currencies, payment networks and so on, regardless of how technically inferior the blockchain is to other more mature distributed databases and networks. They believe one day, the blockchain will be just as efficient or even more so. This subset is vocal about the urgency of increasing Bitcoin's block size limit so that we can increase transaction throughput as much as possible and as soon as possible. On the other hand, most developers who have worked on Bitcoin proper (either protocol development or Core node development) believe that Bitcoin is more about financial sovereignty and censorship resistance, not as an in-place replacement of PayPal or VISA. This group wants to find as many ways to scale the blockchain without increasing the block size limit because increasing the size of blocks puts at risk users' ability to validate the chain. This is because larger blocks means more resources required to transmit, validate and store blocks and if you cannot validate blocks, then you are trusting transaction validators (miners) just like you trust PayPal. Risking the ability to validate the chain is risking the financial sovereignty or censorship resistance they value so much. Regardless of how well some claim SegWit2x is doing, truth is once SegWit is activated, we still have to face the 2x hard fork which many people in the second camp will simply refuse to support. Having said all this, Bitcoin Cash represents an earnest understanding that there are two camps in Bitcoin and because of the differing economic visions, they will have different technical visions, so why not have two chains and evolve them independently? Rather than playing tug-of-war and both parties being dissatisfied?

curyous 9y ago
FYI, a network with 1000x more on-chain transactions, that everyone uses, is much more difficult to censor, than one that requires bank-like organisation with IOUs to the main chain.
- vertex-four 9y ago
  I am unaware of any current proposal which requires putting in place a bank-like organisation. If you're talking about Lightning Network: routing things across a network without requiring a central controller is a very well-studied field.

encryptThrow32 9y ago

The dangers of tx replay mean that HF's like this can never be safe. Beware those that would tell you that these forks are safe, they are not. This is another scam from those that would try to usurp the blockchain. You will be able to replay original bitcoin and abc tx's on each chain, unless you opt-in to some funny new untesed hash. This will hugely disrupt the minority chain ABC, as the mempools on cash chain fill with other valid tx's from main chain. Its going to be a bloodbath. Steer very clear! From: https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/56867/bitcoin-cash-replay-protection https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/56867/bitcoin-ca... Bitcoin Cash (aka Bitcoin ABC aka UAHF) provides two methods of replay protection, both of which are opt in. If you do not create transactions which use these features, then your transactions are vulnerable to replay. The first method is a redefined sighashing algorithm which is basically the same as the one specified by BIP 143. This sighash algorithm is only used when the sighash flag has bit 6 set. These transactions would be invalid on the non-UAHF chain as the different sighashing algorithm will result in invalid transactions. This means that in order to use this, you will need to transact on the UAHF chain first and then on the non-UAHF chain second. The second method uses an OP_RETURN output which has the exact string: Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System as the data of the OP_RETURN. Any transaction which contains this string will be considered invalid by UAHF nodes until block 530,000. This means that prior to block 530,000, you can split your coins by transacting on the non-UAHF chain first with the OP_RETURN output, and then transacting on the UAHF chain second.

stale2002 9y ago
Uhh, protecting your transactions against replay attacks in Hard Fork scenarios like this is a solved problem. There are a multitude of ways to split your coins, so that they are separate, and you don't risk selling the other chain when you don't mean to.
- encryptThrow32 9y ago
  Solved, maybe, but apparently not in this case as the replay mitigation's are opt-in. What would stop someone replaying a regular tx from core chain if this network accepts either replay protected or not tx's?

SeriousM 9y ago

As a bitcoin newbie, I'm even more confused now as before and I don't know if I should start with bitcoin at all..

CyberDildonics 9y ago
Just make sure to read /r/btc and either ignore /r/bitcoin or know that both /r/bitcoin and bitcoin talk are heavily censored and manipulated. Hacker News has some of the same absurdities that pop up, but it isn't as bad. The big question is, do you think 13KB/s AT MOST is too much for your internet connection and computer to handle? Right now it is 1/8th of that, and the /r/bitcoin and 'small blocker' narrative is that anything more is a disaster. Simple math and even slight experience with bitcoin shows that it is exceptionally more likely that this is to create a problem that the company, blockstream, that pays all the gate keepers to the 'core' implementation, can then solve.
- Frogolocalypse 9y ago
  > do you think 13KB/s AT MOST is too much for your internet connection You've quoted this number many times now, and it is completely incorrect. The upload bandwidth required for a full node with eight peers is an absolute minimum of 0.39mbps/mb of block size. The things you're saying are the kind of things that people who really don't have any clue of the resources required by a node would say. In fact, it's pretty clear you don't run a node, have never run a node, and will never run a node. So your opinion as to the security requirements of bitcoin should be viewed in that context.
  - CyberDildonics 9y ago
    That is what it would take to sync with the chain. > The upload bandwidth required for a full node with eight peers is an absolute minimum of 0.39mbps/mb of block size. That doesn't make any sense, it depends on how many people are downloading from you. By the way, you do realize that millions of people upload and download far more than this from torrents right? How can you even say these things with a straight face, they make no sense. > The things you're saying are the kind of things that people who really don't have any clue of the resources required by a node would say. You keep saying I don't know what I'm talking about, but I run half a dozen unlimited and classic nodes, they cost next to nothing. I run one off my phone with a 256GB micro sd card. Do you really think you can't pay $15 USD per month and run even a single full node? A node doesn't even come REMOTELY close to taking up the resources of the cheapest VPS out there. How can anyone take you seriously when you say things like this?

unabridged 9y ago

If you're going to fork bitcoin it should be to change the algorithm so 5 chip companies don't control the entire mining process.

arisAlexis 9y ago

This is a no go im impressed by the upvotes i think HN community is not well informed on the subject