24 ms·

The first Bitcoin Cash block has been mined

373 points by TekMol 9y ago

bsmith 9y ago
Now 4 blocks in: https://cash.coin.dance/blocks#blockDetails https://cash.coin.dance/blocks#blockDetails
- mathieutd 9y ago
  That's surprisingly fast. Much more hashing power than anticipated is backing the fork.
- tlrobinson 9y ago
  Wasn't the fork scheduled to happen ~7 hours ago? Why did the first block take so long if the hashrate is high enough to produce 4 blocks in the subsequent half hour?
  - zorked 9y ago
    The new chain inherited the difficulty from the previous chain. Now that the network realized there isn't as much hash rate the difficulty has been reduced and a more normal rate of block creation restored. Edit: that didn't happen yet, I stand corrected
    - simias 9y ago
      That didn't have time to trigger. Difficulty didn't change.
    - LyndsySimon 9y ago
      My understanding is that it will take much longer than that for the BCC chain difficulty to significantly adjust.
      - eco 9y ago
        2016 blocks from what I understand. That's 14 days at 10 minute blocktimes.
  - simias 9y ago
    The last common block was #478558 mined at 3:16:14 PM UTC The first BCC fork block was mined at 8:12:41 PM, almost 5 hours later. The 2nd one was mined at 8:33:06 PM, 20 minutes later. And then an other one not 5 minutes later. Meanwhile the difficulty remained constant at 860221984436.2223 Clearly there's been a sudden surge in the hash rate.
    - RustyRussell 9y ago
      No, the first block in the fork needed to be > 1MB. But it also changed the format, so they dropped all pending transactions from the mempool. ViaBTC did mine the first bcash block, but it was rejected because it was too small! Someone had to figure out the problem and stuff a block so it could make progress.
ringaroundthetx 9y ago
with an ounce of confidence, maybe people will be too greedy to sell it off.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
provost 9y ago
Interesting -- It still shows "NO UNPLANNED CHAIN SPLIT DETECTED" on https://www.btcforkmonitor.info https://www.btcforkmonitor.info, which a lot of folks are using to monitor the fork (from the other HN thread).
- celticninja 9y ago
  Scroll down to the blue box. That's the bitcoin cash (bch) monitor and it says that the split has occurred as expected. The others were changed to bitcoin that were not expected to cause a fork.
- rory096 9y ago
  Well it's not unplanned.... Note how the Bitcoin Cash box is a different color and says "This node's scheduled chain split has occurred."
solotronics 9y ago
the tyranny of the miners.
JohnJamesRambo 9y ago
It has a lot more hashrate than I expected, I've been pretty surprised. Last number I saw was 3.9% and 247 petahash/s and climbing. I hope it can survive, I actually prefer it to the segwit Bitcoin plan and it seems to follow the original Satoshi plan.
- xorcist 9y ago
  There are some key words that are copy pasted into every conversation of Bitcoin lately. "Satoshi's plan" is one of them. Make of that what you will. Personally I find it a tad bit creepy. Bitcoin is innovative, but it attracts penny stock-like investment schemes like sugar to ants. Of all the sales pitches for this coin, Satoshi's original plan makes the least possible sense. This is a fork from Satoshi's coin that removes features, the most important of which is the enabler of payment channels, which if anything was Satoshi's plan. It's not like it's hard to read Satoshi's writings directly from the source. It's seven years ago, not ancient Rome. The forum has almost all of it intact verbatim and then there's the wiki. In what little sense there ever was a "plan" it's in plain view for everyone to see and read all about what people thought of payment channels, fraud proofs, and everything else.
  - ringaroundthetx 9y ago
    out of curiosity which part? the 9 year old white paper never mentions payment channels this isn't an opinion about any bitcoin fork, just curiosity about what you are referring to. you say its not hard to read satoshi's words, but you rely on having to read and interpret every single forum post scattered around the internet?
    - resf 9y ago
      Literally the first sentence: Commerce on the Internet has come to rely almost exclusively on financial institutions serving as trusted third parties to process electronic payments.
      - ringaroundthetx 9y ago
jahbrewski 9y ago
Can someone provide a summary explaining the significance of this event?
- avaer 9y ago
  There are two incompatible "kinds" of bitcoin now because people disagreed about how to scale the technology.
  - juxncxrlos 9y ago
    Is it clear which fork was followed by most of the people?
    - colordrops 9y ago
      There are several factors at play. First is that BCH is a hard fork, and thus miners need to actively choose to mine BCH instead of BTC. Exchanges need to add support for BCH. You can also look at hash rates, which show how much mining power is behind either coin. You can also look at transaction rates and exchange rates. Despite all this, market forces may drive one or the other coin up or down over the next days and months depending on how important the differing features are to the community. It could also turn out that there is a market for both feature sets and they both do well.
    - tylersmith 9y ago
      By default people that don't change to a BCC client will follow the legacy chain, so if BCC is going to be dominant it will take a while to find out most likely. The price is likely to be very volatile while the market figures out which it wants to follow more.
- abritinthebay 9y ago
  Outside the bitcoin community? Not much. Inside? First salvo in a massive political civil war between interests with different goals. There's this Bitcoin Cash implementation vs Segwit.
agorabinary 9y ago
Despite having a higher hashrate than expected, the price of BCC is crashing towards 1/10 of a bitcoin. The network effects and name recognition of Bitcoin are too strong.
- andrewla 9y ago
  More markets are opening; bittrex [1] just opened and the price is now moving upwards pretty steadily (they opened at ~0.079 BCH/BTC and are now over 0.12), with good volume, 780 BTC ~= $2.1M so far https://bittrex.com/Market/Index?MarketName=BTC-BCC https://bittrex.com/Market/Index?MarketName=BTC-BCC
  - makomk 9y ago
    The bittrex price appears to have diverged quite sharply from, for example, the ViaBTC price[1]. At the time of posting this ViaBTC is 0.127 BCH/BTC and bittrex 0.194 BCH/BTC. I think this may be because ViaBTC is accepting BCH deposits and bittrex isn't. [1] https://www.viabtc.com/quot/realtime?currency=btc&dest=bcc&chart=simple https://www.viabtc.com/quot/realtime?currency=btc&dest=bcc&c...
- runeks 9y ago
  It's interesting to note the trend for the various BCC/BTC markets: the more volume the lower the price[1]. It could be a symptom of most of the volume being sellers dumping into bids. [1] https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin-cash/#markets https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin-cash/#markets
whytaka 9y ago
Does this mean Coinbase wallet holders have officially missed out on the fork?
- bpicolo 9y ago
  It means that Coinbase is currently sitting on a bunch of bitcoin cash that they don't currently publicly plan to distribute (Though if they do add support for cash, they will distribute it, apparently)
  - jnordwick 9y ago
    This is seems susceptible to a lawsuit. It would be the equivalent of a stock M/A or spin-off and your broker refusing to give you any stock issuance you were to receive.
    - NedIsakoff 9y ago
      Or is it something like this: SingerSoft has decided to give 1 share of SingerSoft owner of each share of Microsoft. Unfortunately you're broker isn't going to add it to your account for you.
    - jonknee 9y ago
      Anyone is free to create a fork though, only the company you own shares in can make changes to the shares. If I create a fork of BCC called BCC Plus are you going to lose it when your favorite exchange doesn't give you what's yours?
  - xorcist 9y ago
    It might be useful to note that Bitcoin Cash isn't the first coin to be initially distributed to Bitcoin holders. I believe there are have been two other just this year, and I don't know how many in total. Coinbase has not honored giveaways of these previous coins to their customers, so it sort of makes sense that they treat this one exactly the same. Otherwise they'd have to answer why they treated this one differently. (Most other coins have just copied the UXTO set from a certain block height and not the entire historical blockchain. This saves a lot of space as you can start with megabytes of data instead of a hundred gigabytes. There are probably marketing reasons why it was made this way.)
sixdimensional 9y ago
As someone who missed the Bitcoin boat, I admit to having to read up to figure out what was going on here. From what I read, Bitcoin Cash is an alternative cryptocurrency like Ethereum, but based on a change to the original design of Bitcoin algorithms, which increased the basic block size of the transactions. It seems this was done to increase transaction performance. Also it seems there were competing proposals in the community about how to accomplish the goal of increasing transaction performance, "SegWit2x" and "BitCoin Cash" - and the folks who started the BitCoin Cash fork didn't agree with the SegWit2x strategy. Anybody else more in the know, can explain it like I'm 5? Is this a good thing or a bad thing? Are people exploiting this via some sort of arbitrage or whatever to try to make money again? It seems risky? EDIT: Removed quotes around the word "fork".
- trelliscoded 9y ago
  This is a good overview: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Block_size_limit_controversy#Arguments_in_opposition_to_increasing_the_blocksize https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Block_size_limit_controversy#Argu... There's a bunch of political reasons on both sizes as well.
- sukhadatkeereo 9y ago
  Please listen to this podcast to understand better. Naval Ravikant and Nick Szabo have done a great job explaining the basics. https://tim.blog/2017/06/04/nick-szabo/ https://tim.blog/2017/06/04/nick-szabo/
  - eosophos 9y ago
    Szabo sure seems like Satoshi. Interesting that they bash Litecoin though.
- free2rhyme214 9y ago
  Are you that lazy that you can't look it up? I don't care if I get downvoted.
- Kiro 9y ago
  > From what I read, Bitcoin Cash is an alternative cryptocurrency like Ethereum No, it's a fork. The fact that you put quotation marks around the word makes it seem like you think it's some kind of allegory. It's as much a fork as it gets. Ethereum was a whole new chain, not a fork.
aresant 9y ago
Most fascinating to me has been Coinbase's position throughout this. Which was essentially they are treating the new Bitcoin cash as a shitcoin, aka not supporting it. They took the position that if you want your "free" Bitcoin Cash, move your BTC out of Coinbase.(1) This led to the inevitable service decay & delays that CoinBase has become well known for in the bitcoin community whenever leading up to a high volume event. (2) And yet their internal PR team has given somewhat measured responses that "if Coinbase decides to support Bitcoin Cash in the future, it will distribute the balances that accrue at the time of the August 1 fork." (3) The article w/that nugget goes on to state that when Ethereum split "Coinbase eventually let customers withdraw their share of the new currency, known as "Ethereum Classic," even though it still does not allow it to be bought and sold on the Coinbase site." Seems like a risky bet not to just say something closer to "Hey if Bitcoin Cash is a thing and worth more than 1% of the original BTC we'll support it. If it's not at the end of 90 days we'll give you a way to take it out either way." Judging by the volume of concern and disdain from newbies in the Bitcoin forums a lot of people got woken up by this event and what it means to have your decentralized currency controlled by a central authority. (1) https://blog.coinbase.com/update-for-customers-with-bitcoin-stored-on-coinbase-99e2d4790a53?gi=5c5ca3523686 https://blog.coinbase.com/update-for-customers-with-bitcoin-... (2) http://bitcoinist.com/mass-exodus-from-coinbase-spawns-12hour-bitcoin-withdrawal-delays/ http://bitcoinist.com/mass-exodus-from-coinbase-spawns-12hou... (3) http://fortune.com/2017/07/31/bitcoin-fork-coinbase/ http://fortune.com/2017/07/31/bitcoin-fork-coinbase/
- pfisch 9y ago
  Yeah that was a pretty crappy attitude considering BCC is trading at $200 right now. I imagine a lot of early bitcoin buyers used coinbase and are sitting on like 10+ btc. Not really cool to be ambiguous about stealing $2000+ from your users.
  - ShabbosGoy 9y ago
    In what way is deciding not to support BCC stealing? It's more akin to a forex brokerage deciding not to support EUR when it first came out over the lira. You can easily use someone else, Coinbase is hardly the only service around.
TekMol 9y ago
1.9 MByte in size / 6985 transactions. This is about twice as much as is possible in a block of the old Bitcoin chain. This will become super interesting.
- hendzen 9y ago
  Yeah, if the fees are lower and the network is less congested I wonder if legacy Bitcoin could get overtaken for small transactions?
  - TekMol 9y ago
    If so, that would be a historic victory of pragmatism. A lot of popular engineers in powerful positions have been working for years on how to scale Bitcoin. Now some people said "Fuck that! We will just increase this integer from 1 to 8". Reminds me of how Linus Torvalds created a simple monolithic Kernel while GNU&Co were working on sophisticated microkernels. Now, 26 years later, everything from servers to smartphones runs on Linux. And GNU Herd is still considered experimental.
    - omgtehlion 9y ago
      With the same success you could have forked bitcoin with the same block size, or just minor increase. BCC is currently not congested only due to small number of transactions happening there.
    - poorman 9y ago
      And here I thought Linux won out because BSD was wrapped up in a lawsuit. http://thevarguy.com/open-source-application-software-companies/062615/open-source-history-why-didnt-bsd-beat-out-gnu-and-linux http://thevarguy.com/open-source-application-software-compan...
      - kbenson 9y ago
        Ultimately, the legal drama did not undercut programmers' ability to use or redistribute BSD. However, it did stunt adoption of the operating system by creating doubts about BSD's legal future. In the time frame they are talking about, 1993-1994, almost nobody was using Linux commercially (except tjhe distros selling it). Even after that, Linux was fairly immature. If BSD was going to be a real contender, it still had a sizable lead. That it didn't win in the end leads me to believe other factors were more important, such as the license (which the article you linked also notes). The BSD license is more permissive and appealing to a lot of organizations, but the requirement of the GPL to give back ultimately lead to a virtuous cycle where companies moved portions of their code in-kernel, because out of kernel is more problematic if it's also not proprietary.
brndnmtthws 9y ago
To me, it seems like Bitcoin Cash (BCH) is just a cash grab (no pun intended) by a minority of misguided Bitcoin enthusiasts. From what I can tell, the main reason for the resistance to Segwit is that it reduces the power and influence of miners. That's why the people who are pushing BCH are also invested in mining. Miners earn money from transaction fees, and therefore have an incentive to artificially inflate the fees by delaying transactions (transactions are processed in order of highest to lowest fees). There's a great blog post which summarizes the situation here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-heck-bitcoin-might-split-two-august-1-mohit-mamoria https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-heck-bitcoin-might-split-...
- MichaelGG 9y ago
  Why would a larger block size increase fees? ASICBoost might be a reason miners are against segwit. But enabling offchain payments kills the P2P aspect pretty hard. There's no good reason for not having had at least 2MB blocks years ago. And it'd have provided solid info on the real impact, not just fear mongering.
  - brndnmtthws 9y ago
    I addressed this in another reply, but I'll repeat: it's a temporary solution. You're merely delaying the inevitable, since the block size limit can't be changed without a hard fork.
    - MichaelGG 9y ago
      I don't think anyone is arguing otherwise. But 2x or 8x'ing the capacity would be welcome, especially a while ago when the mempool was dozens of MB. It's silly to say it's not a permanent solution therefore not worth doing at all.
- dwaltrip 9y ago
  There isn't a legitimate reason to restrict block sizes to 1MB. That is the primary reason for the fork. Some claim that anything larger than 1MB will "hurt decentralization", but many others have shown this to be a very weak argument (sorry, I don't have any links handy). You don't need every Jane Smith running a full node on a rasberry pi to have robust decentralization.
burger_moon 9y ago
Are there any reputable exchanges which you can buy bitcoin cash from yet?
- TaylorGood 9y ago
  Bittrex and others
  - ruleabidinguser 9y ago
    Bittrex is telling me I can't... what others?
    - doctoboggan 9y ago
      You can get them on Kraken
xbeta 9y ago
Quick Question: Sorry, don't know much about Bitcoin, but does this mean Block #478559 is the last block that was forked? Or the first block that was forked?
- redog 9y ago
  478558 is the last common block 478559 is the forked one.
mathieutd 9y ago
Interesting to see that the backlog in unprocessed transactions on the original bitcoin chain is exploding at the same time: https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#24h https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#24h
- TD-Linux 9y ago
  I suspect that many people are sending their balances to a new address, so that they can import their old keys into a Bitcoin Cash client.
  - BenoitP 9y ago
    The fees are very low, and all the same sizes. My take on this is this is partisans of big blocks saturating the original chain; as if to try to prove a point. It does cost them some little amount of money, though.
jamiegreen 9y ago
Forgive the naive question, but how does the whole 'free Bitcoin Cash' thing work? I have a small amount of Bitcoin in the Exodus wallet.
- pkilgore 9y ago
  Think of it like copying twitter's database then launching a competitor. All tweets, users, etc. on both sites are the same up until the day the database is copied. Then the tweets, users etc. can be different depending on which site folks use. You get all your tweets on the new site for free. Same with BCC. They copied the Bitcoin database at block 478558. So if you have a coin in a BTC account before block 478558, you now have the same coin on the BTC chain, and a copy of that coin on the copied BCC chain. To use it, you just need to use a BCC wallet, the same way you'd use a BTC wallet to use BTC. But if you don't know your private key (usually because your coin was on an exchange) then you are out of luck. Google if your exchange will credit you BCC.
  - tylersmith 9y ago
    I've tried explaining this to numerous people but never thought about comparing it to starting a clone of a website with the same DB to start with. Great analogy.
  - k__ 9y ago
    Also, you can write 1000 character tweets in the fork.
  - jamiegreen 9y ago
    Great explanation, thanks!
- gwbas1c 9y ago
  Basically, Bitcoin cash is another kind of cryptocurrency as Bitcoin. The naming is somewhat confusing. If you owned Bitcoin at the start of Bitcoin cash, you get free Bitcoin cash. There are technical differences that may make one or the other succeed.
aphextron 9y ago
tl;dr what does this mean?
- antocv 9y ago
  There is 2 bitcoins now. Bitcoin Core with feature of segregated witness (segwit). And Bitcoin Cash with increased block size limit.
dang 9y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14899881 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14899881 is related.
xbeta 9y ago
ELI5: For folks who moved BTC out of Coinbase before the hard-fork, what's the next step? Said I want to keep both BTC and BCC. I had a hardware wallet, what are some implications that I move my BTC now to my hardware wallet?
- landhar 9y ago
  I had the same question earlier, and I found the following statement by the maintainers of the Electrum wallet very englightning: https://electrum.org/bcc.txt https://electrum.org/bcc.txt In particular this section: > How to redeem my BCC? > BCC wallets will require you to import your seed or your private keys, which can be exported from Electrum. Doing so will expose all your Bitcoin funds associated with that seed to the BCC wallet you decide to use. > Therefore, after the BCC fork, but before you enter a seed or private key in a BCC wallet, you should move all your funds to a new Electrum wallet, with a new seed. You will still be able to use the old seed or private key with BCC, because BCC has replay protection. Wait until your funds are confirmed in your new Bitcoin wallet, before you enter the old private key in a BCC wallet. This will protect your BTC funds from rogue/untrusted software.
  - xbeta 9y ago
    Great find! I guess I will have to wait for that Electrum wallet which supports BCC then, then transfer?
- thescriptkiddie 9y ago
  Ledger is offering a split tool in their hardware wallets: https://blog.ledger.co/managing-the-bitcoin-cash-fork-7229dde3f358 https://blog.ledger.co/managing-the-bitcoin-cash-fork-7229dd...
jnordwick 9y ago
Not surprisingly, when BCH started, it ran up about $150 and at the same time, BCT fell by a similar amount (approx $2800 to $2650). And as BCH slowly falls, BCT is slowly climbing. Which makes sense if you view this as an equity spin-off. I would expect this relationship to hold -- that for every dollar BCH gains, BCT is prevented from gaining a dollar. Unless somebody has some good reason this wouldn't be the case. At the same time ETH ran up from about $205 to $225.
- tlrobinson 9y ago
  (I assume you mean BTC not BCT) I would expect the total value to decline if there's not one clear winner, since the value somewhat depends on network effects (e.g. Metcalf's Law)
- sobani 9y ago
  For posterity it's notable that at this moment BTC is at $2694.88, while BCH is at $691.94. Following your assumption that means that the split increased the total value by about $600! Make of that what you will. :)
  - jnordwick 9y ago
    Where did you get that price from because i dont see that BCH has been anywhere close to that since yesterday.
    - sobani 9y ago
      https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin-cash https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin-cash I did happen to write my comment around the top of the price chart, as the current price is $447.
techaddict009 9y ago
Finally BTC has been hard forked and BCH & BTC are live. Some fun facts: Forked should have name XBC as per ISO bt thats already taken so they named BCH 1st BCH block 478559 & BTC Block no 478559 where mined by ViaBTC ViaBTC dedicated BCH block to her daughter by adding comment on 1st Block of BCH "�_M�*/ViaBTC/Welcome to the world, Shuya Yang!/�q��3�0c"
- dingo_bat 9y ago
  And it was rejected, wasn't it?
Animats 9y ago
That gets the chain un-stuck. The difficulty starts off with the old, huge value. The next difficulty adjustment will be at ceil(478560 / 2016), correct? That's 1248 blocks ahead. Check me on this, please. If mining of that chain is very low, it will take a long time before the difficulty adjusts downward. So far 6 blocks have been mined on that chain.[1] Rate is maybe one per hour, instead of the usual one every 10 minutes. That puts the difficulty adjustment maybe six weeks out. We'll have to see who mines on that chain. The hash rate may go up or down, depending on what the big miners do. Mining will be unprofitable until the next difficulty adjustment, because the price of the coin is lower than the "mainstream" coin. Confirmations will be really slow. After the next adjustment, the chain will work better. Something similar happened to some altcoins. Some big miner mined for a while, made some money, ran up the difficulty adjustment way up, and then stopped. Block generation then stalled. This thing self-adjusts, but adjusts to big changes in hash rate very slowly. [1] http://blockdozer.com/insight/ http://blockdozer.com/insight/
- cesarb 9y ago
  IIRC, this particular hardfork has a change to allow for fast downward adjustments of its difficulty after just a few blocks, in case too few blocks were found in the last 12 hours. It should already have enough blocks for this special code to get triggered.
  - Animats 9y ago
    Here's the code change.[1] "Triggering it require to lose 92% of the hashrate abruptly." That's protection against a total stall. It looks like hash rate is down, but not by that much. It may still take a while to get to the next difficulty adjustment. It's up to the big miners. [1] https://reviews.bitcoinabc.org/D298 https://reviews.bitcoinabc.org/D298
    - Animats 9y ago
      The emergency difficulty adjustment finally tripped, and block times are now around 25 minutes.[1] 40 blocks mined so far, 1208 to the next difficulty adjustment. So about 3 weeks to go until the next regular difficulty adjustment, which should bring block times down to the usual 10 minutes. After that, BCC should function normally. The financial end is a separate issue; that won't be clear until BCC markets are fully functional. [1] https://medium.com/@SimpleCrypto/bitcoin-cash-difficulty-adjustment-results-in-25min-blocks-48cbc1ac004e https://medium.com/@SimpleCrypto/bitcoin-cash-difficulty-adj...
fpgaminer 9y ago
Something very important that I don't see advertised, with regard to BCH. The primary client, BitcoinABC, completely changed consensus rules a mere 5 days before the hardfork: https://github.com/Bitcoin-ABC/bitcoin-abc/blob/174846aaaf564e64b6bd06d679996b52ba86ad53/doc/release-notes/release-notes-0.14.5.md https://github.com/Bitcoin-ABC/bitcoin-abc/blob/174846aaaf56... The important bit: > Enforce strong replay protection (require SIGHASH_FORKID and SCRIPT_VERIFY_STRICTENC compliance) That completely changes the consensus rules of BCH. Again, 5 days before a hardfork. 5 days. I just ... I can't wrap my brain around why _anyone_ in their right mind would think that BCH should be worth anything, if this is the acumen of the development team. Why would any exchange trust the code? Why would users trust the code? If BCH is any kind of experiment, it's not an experiment of big-block vs small block (Bitcoin has had bigger block functionality for over 6 months now). It's an experiment to see if cowboy programmers can patch a live $40 billion network willy nilly and convince everyone that that's okay.
- mchristen 9y ago
  If anything the fact that things are working as intended(so far) proves that such a change is not nearly as dangerous as BCC developers make it out to be. If you don't trust the code powering BCH then you can simply ignore all your coins on BCH and pretend they don't exist, you're in the exact same situation as you were yesterday. The fear mongering of 'all hard forks are dangerous' is just that, fear mongering, and has no basis in actual reality.
  - Misker 9y ago
    I agree with the fearmongering bit, but ignoring BCH is a little more difficult. BCH just caused a pretty decent dip in the price of BTC, and will likely make it drop further. Unless it crashes and burns, in which case faith in Core will be even stronger.
    - zeusk 9y ago
      5% at Bitcoin's level of volatility is not a dip.
mikeschmatz 9y ago
So, if you held 100 BTC before the fork, now you get to have 100BTC + 100BCC? Nice! Can we fork it few more times please? Me likes free money :-)
MINTY1 9y ago
Its quite entertaining reading so many comments on bitcoin and crypto currency ..None of you ,and i mean none of you understand the first thing about the entire concept..while all of you invest in ICOs you have to turn your hard real currency $ /£s etc into bit coin ..creating more blocks to be mined ..THEN YOU SUBSCRIBE TO NEW ICOs ..which if you really looked into them are often run by the same groups of people ..Just check the name and image match on the white papers..the ,the price of that ICI moves an people trade out into BTC ,creating more BTC and whatever coin you have traded mineable ...All of you hoping to get rich ...The miners of course are making money ..usualy using piggy backed IP addresses so they don't use electricity ..The mining systems software sellers are all making..the exchanges are and the miners are ..The bigger the player the more they make and only release small broken quantities onto the market for more to be mined ..the $100 billion value of crypto is not much..But the whole concept is trading currency and information blocks cheaply ..When the mined coins run out ..what will the commission be ,much more than existing ..however all the big players will have made a fortune off all the small players suckers enough to believe the cleverly worked hype of the big players ..NOOne will tell you differently ..But That is why satoshi mined the first million coins ..because he didn't want so much easy coins floating around and also why Vitalik Buterin looks so sad at all ICO meets ..because he suddenly found out he was dealing with organised crime
MINTY1 9y ago
Its quite entertaining reading so many comments on bitcoin and crypto currency ..None of you ,and i mean none of you understand the first thing about the entire concept..while all of you invest in ICOs you have to turn your hard real currency $ /£s etc into bit coin ..creating more blocks to be mined ..THEN YOU SUBSCRIBE TO NEW ICOs ..which if you really looked into them are often run by the same groups of people ..Just check the name and image match on the white papers..the ,the price of that ICI moves an people trade out into BTC ,creating more BTC and whatever coin you have traded mineable ...All of you hoping to get rich ...The miners of course are making money ..usualy using piggy backed IP addresses so they don't use electricity ..The mining systems software sellers are all making..the exchanges are and the miners are ..The bigger the player the more they make and only release small broken quantities onto the market for more to be mined ..the $100 billion value of crypto is not much..But the whole concept is trading currency and information blocks cheaply ..When the mined coins run out ..what will the commission be ,much more than existing ..however all the big players will have made a fortune off all the small players suckers enough to believe the cleverly worked hype of the big players ..NOOne will tell you differently ..But That is why satoshi mined the first million coins ..because he didn't want so much easy coins floating around and also why Vitalik Buterin looks so sad at all ICO meets ..because he suddenly found out he was dealing with organised crime
MINTY1 9y ago
Its quite entertaining reading so many comments on bitcoin and crypto currency ..None of you ,and i mean none of you understand the first thing about the entire concept..while all of you invest in ICOs you have to turn your hard real currency $ /£s etc into bit coin ..creating more blocks to be mined ..THEN YOU SUBSCRIBE TO NEW ICOs ..which if you really looked into them are often run by the same groups of people ..Just check the name and image match on the white papers..the ,the price of that ICI moves an people trade out into BTC ,creating more BTC and whatever coin you have traded mineable ...All of you hoping to get rich ...The miners of course are making money ..usualy using piggy backed IP addresses so they don't use electricity ..The mining systems software sellers are all making..the exchanges are and the miners are ..The bigger the player the more they make and only release small broken quantities onto the market for more to be mined ..the $100 billion value of crypto is not much..But the whole concept is trading currency and information blocks cheaply ..When the mined coins run out ..what will the commission be ,much more than existing ..however all the big players will have made a fortune off all the small players suckers enough to believe the cleverly worked hype of the big players ..NOOne will tell you differently ..But That is why satoshi mined the first million coins ..because he didn't want so much easy coins floating around and also why Vitalik Buterin looks so sad at all ICO meets ..because he suddenly found out he was dealing with organised crime
mrfusion 9y ago
I'm confused by all this. What happens if you have a small paper wallet from a few years ago? That means you also have bitcoin cash now?
- hossbeast 9y ago
  Yes
hughw 9y ago
Does this take the pressure off the planned hard fork for Segwit2x? Big blockers now have what they wanted. Seems like BTC could now be the small-block paradise Core wants.
konschubert 9y ago
Is it possible that all these forks will eventually just become alternative cryptocurrencies just like Etherum or Litecoin? People will use whatever fits their use case and there will be well-oiled exchanges arbitraging the valuations. I'm probably neglecting some of the short term effects of a splitting chain here.
vedoza 9y ago
now bitcoin cash https://www.exchangeratesdata.com/convert/BCH/USD/ https://www.exchangeratesdata.com/convert/BCH/USD/
dorianm 9y ago
Also https://pointsproject.org https://pointsproject.org for those interested in new curriencies

373 points by TekMol 9y ago

bsmith 9y ago

Now 4 blocks in: https://cash.coin.dance/blocks#blockDetails https://cash.coin.dance/blocks#blockDetails

mathieutd 9y ago
That's surprisingly fast. Much more hashing power than anticipated is backing the fork.
tlrobinson 9y ago
Wasn't the fork scheduled to happen ~7 hours ago? Why did the first block take so long if the hashrate is high enough to produce 4 blocks in the subsequent half hour?
- zorked 9y ago
  The new chain inherited the difficulty from the previous chain. Now that the network realized there isn't as much hash rate the difficulty has been reduced and a more normal rate of block creation restored. Edit: that didn't happen yet, I stand corrected
  - simias 9y ago
    That didn't have time to trigger. Difficulty didn't change.
  - LyndsySimon 9y ago
    My understanding is that it will take much longer than that for the BCC chain difficulty to significantly adjust.
    - eco 9y ago
      2016 blocks from what I understand. That's 14 days at 10 minute blocktimes.
- simias 9y ago
  The last common block was #478558 mined at 3:16:14 PM UTC The first BCC fork block was mined at 8:12:41 PM, almost 5 hours later. The 2nd one was mined at 8:33:06 PM, 20 minutes later. And then an other one not 5 minutes later. Meanwhile the difficulty remained constant at 860221984436.2223 Clearly there's been a sudden surge in the hash rate.
  - RustyRussell 9y ago
    No, the first block in the fork needed to be > 1MB. But it also changed the format, so they dropped all pending transactions from the mempool. ViaBTC did mine the first bcash block, but it was rejected because it was too small! Someone had to figure out the problem and stuff a block so it could make progress.

ringaroundthetx 9y ago

with an ounce of confidence, maybe people will be too greedy to sell it off.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

provost 9y ago

Interesting -- It still shows "NO UNPLANNED CHAIN SPLIT DETECTED" on https://www.btcforkmonitor.info https://www.btcforkmonitor.info, which a lot of folks are using to monitor the fork (from the other HN thread).

celticninja 9y ago
Scroll down to the blue box. That's the bitcoin cash (bch) monitor and it says that the split has occurred as expected. The others were changed to bitcoin that were not expected to cause a fork.
rory096 9y ago
Well it's not unplanned.... Note how the Bitcoin Cash box is a different color and says "This node's scheduled chain split has occurred."

solotronics 9y ago

the tyranny of the miners.

JohnJamesRambo 9y ago

It has a lot more hashrate than I expected, I've been pretty surprised. Last number I saw was 3.9% and 247 petahash/s and climbing. I hope it can survive, I actually prefer it to the segwit Bitcoin plan and it seems to follow the original Satoshi plan.

xorcist 9y ago
There are some key words that are copy pasted into every conversation of Bitcoin lately. "Satoshi's plan" is one of them. Make of that what you will. Personally I find it a tad bit creepy. Bitcoin is innovative, but it attracts penny stock-like investment schemes like sugar to ants. Of all the sales pitches for this coin, Satoshi's original plan makes the least possible sense. This is a fork from Satoshi's coin that removes features, the most important of which is the enabler of payment channels, which if anything was Satoshi's plan. It's not like it's hard to read Satoshi's writings directly from the source. It's seven years ago, not ancient Rome. The forum has almost all of it intact verbatim and then there's the wiki. In what little sense there ever was a "plan" it's in plain view for everyone to see and read all about what people thought of payment channels, fraud proofs, and everything else.
- ringaroundthetx 9y ago
  out of curiosity which part? the 9 year old white paper never mentions payment channels this isn't an opinion about any bitcoin fork, just curiosity about what you are referring to. you say its not hard to read satoshi's words, but you rely on having to read and interpret every single forum post scattered around the internet?
  - resf 9y ago
    Literally the first sentence: Commerce on the Internet has come to rely almost exclusively on financial institutions serving as trusted third parties to process electronic payments.
    - ringaroundthetx 9y ago

jahbrewski 9y ago

Can someone provide a summary explaining the significance of this event?

avaer 9y ago
There are two incompatible "kinds" of bitcoin now because people disagreed about how to scale the technology.
- juxncxrlos 9y ago
  Is it clear which fork was followed by most of the people?
  - colordrops 9y ago
    There are several factors at play. First is that BCH is a hard fork, and thus miners need to actively choose to mine BCH instead of BTC. Exchanges need to add support for BCH. You can also look at hash rates, which show how much mining power is behind either coin. You can also look at transaction rates and exchange rates. Despite all this, market forces may drive one or the other coin up or down over the next days and months depending on how important the differing features are to the community. It could also turn out that there is a market for both feature sets and they both do well.
  - tylersmith 9y ago
    By default people that don't change to a BCC client will follow the legacy chain, so if BCC is going to be dominant it will take a while to find out most likely. The price is likely to be very volatile while the market figures out which it wants to follow more.
abritinthebay 9y ago
Outside the bitcoin community? Not much. Inside? First salvo in a massive political civil war between interests with different goals. There's this Bitcoin Cash implementation vs Segwit.

agorabinary 9y ago

Despite having a higher hashrate than expected, the price of BCC is crashing towards 1/10 of a bitcoin. The network effects and name recognition of Bitcoin are too strong.

andrewla 9y ago
More markets are opening; bittrex [1] just opened and the price is now moving upwards pretty steadily (they opened at ~0.079 BCH/BTC and are now over 0.12), with good volume, 780 BTC ~= $2.1M so far https://bittrex.com/Market/Index?MarketName=BTC-BCC https://bittrex.com/Market/Index?MarketName=BTC-BCC
- makomk 9y ago
  The bittrex price appears to have diverged quite sharply from, for example, the ViaBTC price[1]. At the time of posting this ViaBTC is 0.127 BCH/BTC and bittrex 0.194 BCH/BTC. I think this may be because ViaBTC is accepting BCH deposits and bittrex isn't. [1] https://www.viabtc.com/quot/realtime?currency=btc&dest=bcc&chart=simple https://www.viabtc.com/quot/realtime?currency=btc&dest=bcc&c...
runeks 9y ago
It's interesting to note the trend for the various BCC/BTC markets: the more volume the lower the price[1]. It could be a symptom of most of the volume being sellers dumping into bids. [1] https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin-cash/#markets https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin-cash/#markets

whytaka 9y ago

Does this mean Coinbase wallet holders have officially missed out on the fork?

bpicolo 9y ago
It means that Coinbase is currently sitting on a bunch of bitcoin cash that they don't currently publicly plan to distribute (Though if they do add support for cash, they will distribute it, apparently)
- jnordwick 9y ago
  This is seems susceptible to a lawsuit. It would be the equivalent of a stock M/A or spin-off and your broker refusing to give you any stock issuance you were to receive.
  - NedIsakoff 9y ago
    Or is it something like this: SingerSoft has decided to give 1 share of SingerSoft owner of each share of Microsoft. Unfortunately you're broker isn't going to add it to your account for you.
  - jonknee 9y ago
    Anyone is free to create a fork though, only the company you own shares in can make changes to the shares. If I create a fork of BCC called BCC Plus are you going to lose it when your favorite exchange doesn't give you what's yours?
- xorcist 9y ago
  It might be useful to note that Bitcoin Cash isn't the first coin to be initially distributed to Bitcoin holders. I believe there are have been two other just this year, and I don't know how many in total. Coinbase has not honored giveaways of these previous coins to their customers, so it sort of makes sense that they treat this one exactly the same. Otherwise they'd have to answer why they treated this one differently. (Most other coins have just copied the UXTO set from a certain block height and not the entire historical blockchain. This saves a lot of space as you can start with megabytes of data instead of a hundred gigabytes. There are probably marketing reasons why it was made this way.)

sixdimensional 9y ago

As someone who missed the Bitcoin boat, I admit to having to read up to figure out what was going on here. From what I read, Bitcoin Cash is an alternative cryptocurrency like Ethereum, but based on a change to the original design of Bitcoin algorithms, which increased the basic block size of the transactions. It seems this was done to increase transaction performance. Also it seems there were competing proposals in the community about how to accomplish the goal of increasing transaction performance, "SegWit2x" and "BitCoin Cash" - and the folks who started the BitCoin Cash fork didn't agree with the SegWit2x strategy. Anybody else more in the know, can explain it like I'm 5? Is this a good thing or a bad thing? Are people exploiting this via some sort of arbitrage or whatever to try to make money again? It seems risky? EDIT: Removed quotes around the word "fork".

trelliscoded 9y ago
This is a good overview: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Block_size_limit_controversy#Arguments_in_opposition_to_increasing_the_blocksize https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Block_size_limit_controversy#Argu... There's a bunch of political reasons on both sizes as well.
sukhadatkeereo 9y ago
Please listen to this podcast to understand better. Naval Ravikant and Nick Szabo have done a great job explaining the basics. https://tim.blog/2017/06/04/nick-szabo/ https://tim.blog/2017/06/04/nick-szabo/
- eosophos 9y ago
  Szabo sure seems like Satoshi. Interesting that they bash Litecoin though.
free2rhyme214 9y ago
Are you that lazy that you can't look it up? I don't care if I get downvoted.
Kiro 9y ago
> From what I read, Bitcoin Cash is an alternative cryptocurrency like Ethereum No, it's a fork. The fact that you put quotation marks around the word makes it seem like you think it's some kind of allegory. It's as much a fork as it gets. Ethereum was a whole new chain, not a fork.

aresant 9y ago

Most fascinating to me has been Coinbase's position throughout this. Which was essentially they are treating the new Bitcoin cash as a shitcoin, aka not supporting it. They took the position that if you want your "free" Bitcoin Cash, move your BTC out of Coinbase.(1) This led to the inevitable service decay & delays that CoinBase has become well known for in the bitcoin community whenever leading up to a high volume event. (2) And yet their internal PR team has given somewhat measured responses that "if Coinbase decides to support Bitcoin Cash in the future, it will distribute the balances that accrue at the time of the August 1 fork." (3) The article w/that nugget goes on to state that when Ethereum split "Coinbase eventually let customers withdraw their share of the new currency, known as "Ethereum Classic," even though it still does not allow it to be bought and sold on the Coinbase site." Seems like a risky bet not to just say something closer to "Hey if Bitcoin Cash is a thing and worth more than 1% of the original BTC we'll support it. If it's not at the end of 90 days we'll give you a way to take it out either way." Judging by the volume of concern and disdain from newbies in the Bitcoin forums a lot of people got woken up by this event and what it means to have your decentralized currency controlled by a central authority. (1) https://blog.coinbase.com/update-for-customers-with-bitcoin-stored-on-coinbase-99e2d4790a53?gi=5c5ca3523686 https://blog.coinbase.com/update-for-customers-with-bitcoin-... (2) http://bitcoinist.com/mass-exodus-from-coinbase-spawns-12hour-bitcoin-withdrawal-delays/ http://bitcoinist.com/mass-exodus-from-coinbase-spawns-12hou... (3) http://fortune.com/2017/07/31/bitcoin-fork-coinbase/ http://fortune.com/2017/07/31/bitcoin-fork-coinbase/

pfisch 9y ago
Yeah that was a pretty crappy attitude considering BCC is trading at $200 right now. I imagine a lot of early bitcoin buyers used coinbase and are sitting on like 10+ btc. Not really cool to be ambiguous about stealing $2000+ from your users.
- ShabbosGoy 9y ago
  In what way is deciding not to support BCC stealing? It's more akin to a forex brokerage deciding not to support EUR when it first came out over the lira. You can easily use someone else, Coinbase is hardly the only service around.

TekMol 9y ago

1.9 MByte in size / 6985 transactions. This is about twice as much as is possible in a block of the old Bitcoin chain. This will become super interesting.

hendzen 9y ago
Yeah, if the fees are lower and the network is less congested I wonder if legacy Bitcoin could get overtaken for small transactions?
- TekMol 9y ago
  If so, that would be a historic victory of pragmatism. A lot of popular engineers in powerful positions have been working for years on how to scale Bitcoin. Now some people said "Fuck that! We will just increase this integer from 1 to 8". Reminds me of how Linus Torvalds created a simple monolithic Kernel while GNU&Co were working on sophisticated microkernels. Now, 26 years later, everything from servers to smartphones runs on Linux. And GNU Herd is still considered experimental.
  - omgtehlion 9y ago
    With the same success you could have forked bitcoin with the same block size, or just minor increase. BCC is currently not congested only due to small number of transactions happening there.
  - poorman 9y ago
    And here I thought Linux won out because BSD was wrapped up in a lawsuit. http://thevarguy.com/open-source-application-software-companies/062615/open-source-history-why-didnt-bsd-beat-out-gnu-and-linux http://thevarguy.com/open-source-application-software-compan...
    - kbenson 9y ago
      Ultimately, the legal drama did not undercut programmers' ability to use or redistribute BSD. However, it did stunt adoption of the operating system by creating doubts about BSD's legal future. In the time frame they are talking about, 1993-1994, almost nobody was using Linux commercially (except tjhe distros selling it). Even after that, Linux was fairly immature. If BSD was going to be a real contender, it still had a sizable lead. That it didn't win in the end leads me to believe other factors were more important, such as the license (which the article you linked also notes). The BSD license is more permissive and appealing to a lot of organizations, but the requirement of the GPL to give back ultimately lead to a virtuous cycle where companies moved portions of their code in-kernel, because out of kernel is more problematic if it's also not proprietary.

brndnmtthws 9y ago

To me, it seems like Bitcoin Cash (BCH) is just a cash grab (no pun intended) by a minority of misguided Bitcoin enthusiasts. From what I can tell, the main reason for the resistance to Segwit is that it reduces the power and influence of miners. That's why the people who are pushing BCH are also invested in mining. Miners earn money from transaction fees, and therefore have an incentive to artificially inflate the fees by delaying transactions (transactions are processed in order of highest to lowest fees). There's a great blog post which summarizes the situation here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-heck-bitcoin-might-split-two-august-1-mohit-mamoria https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-heck-bitcoin-might-split-...

MichaelGG 9y ago
Why would a larger block size increase fees? ASICBoost might be a reason miners are against segwit. But enabling offchain payments kills the P2P aspect pretty hard. There's no good reason for not having had at least 2MB blocks years ago. And it'd have provided solid info on the real impact, not just fear mongering.
- brndnmtthws 9y ago
  I addressed this in another reply, but I'll repeat: it's a temporary solution. You're merely delaying the inevitable, since the block size limit can't be changed without a hard fork.
  - MichaelGG 9y ago
    I don't think anyone is arguing otherwise. But 2x or 8x'ing the capacity would be welcome, especially a while ago when the mempool was dozens of MB. It's silly to say it's not a permanent solution therefore not worth doing at all.
dwaltrip 9y ago
There isn't a legitimate reason to restrict block sizes to 1MB. That is the primary reason for the fork. Some claim that anything larger than 1MB will "hurt decentralization", but many others have shown this to be a very weak argument (sorry, I don't have any links handy). You don't need every Jane Smith running a full node on a rasberry pi to have robust decentralization.

burger_moon 9y ago

Are there any reputable exchanges which you can buy bitcoin cash from yet?

TaylorGood 9y ago
Bittrex and others
- ruleabidinguser 9y ago
  Bittrex is telling me I can't... what others?
  - doctoboggan 9y ago
    You can get them on Kraken

xbeta 9y ago

Quick Question: Sorry, don't know much about Bitcoin, but does this mean Block #478559 is the last block that was forked? Or the first block that was forked?

redog 9y ago
478558 is the last common block 478559 is the forked one.

mathieutd 9y ago

Interesting to see that the backlog in unprocessed transactions on the original bitcoin chain is exploding at the same time: https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#24h https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#24h

TD-Linux 9y ago
I suspect that many people are sending their balances to a new address, so that they can import their old keys into a Bitcoin Cash client.
- BenoitP 9y ago
  The fees are very low, and all the same sizes. My take on this is this is partisans of big blocks saturating the original chain; as if to try to prove a point. It does cost them some little amount of money, though.

jamiegreen 9y ago

Forgive the naive question, but how does the whole 'free Bitcoin Cash' thing work? I have a small amount of Bitcoin in the Exodus wallet.

pkilgore 9y ago
Think of it like copying twitter's database then launching a competitor. All tweets, users, etc. on both sites are the same up until the day the database is copied. Then the tweets, users etc. can be different depending on which site folks use. You get all your tweets on the new site for free. Same with BCC. They copied the Bitcoin database at block 478558. So if you have a coin in a BTC account before block 478558, you now have the same coin on the BTC chain, and a copy of that coin on the copied BCC chain. To use it, you just need to use a BCC wallet, the same way you'd use a BTC wallet to use BTC. But if you don't know your private key (usually because your coin was on an exchange) then you are out of luck. Google if your exchange will credit you BCC.
- tylersmith 9y ago
  I've tried explaining this to numerous people but never thought about comparing it to starting a clone of a website with the same DB to start with. Great analogy.
- k__ 9y ago
  Also, you can write 1000 character tweets in the fork.
- jamiegreen 9y ago
  Great explanation, thanks!
gwbas1c 9y ago
Basically, Bitcoin cash is another kind of cryptocurrency as Bitcoin. The naming is somewhat confusing. If you owned Bitcoin at the start of Bitcoin cash, you get free Bitcoin cash. There are technical differences that may make one or the other succeed.

aphextron 9y ago

tl;dr what does this mean?

antocv 9y ago
There is 2 bitcoins now. Bitcoin Core with feature of segregated witness (segwit). And Bitcoin Cash with increased block size limit.

dang 9y ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14899881 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14899881 is related.

xbeta 9y ago

ELI5: For folks who moved BTC out of Coinbase before the hard-fork, what's the next step? Said I want to keep both BTC and BCC. I had a hardware wallet, what are some implications that I move my BTC now to my hardware wallet?

landhar 9y ago
I had the same question earlier, and I found the following statement by the maintainers of the Electrum wallet very englightning: https://electrum.org/bcc.txt https://electrum.org/bcc.txt In particular this section: > How to redeem my BCC? > BCC wallets will require you to import your seed or your private keys, which can be exported from Electrum. Doing so will expose all your Bitcoin funds associated with that seed to the BCC wallet you decide to use. > Therefore, after the BCC fork, but before you enter a seed or private key in a BCC wallet, you should move all your funds to a new Electrum wallet, with a new seed. You will still be able to use the old seed or private key with BCC, because BCC has replay protection. Wait until your funds are confirmed in your new Bitcoin wallet, before you enter the old private key in a BCC wallet. This will protect your BTC funds from rogue/untrusted software.
- xbeta 9y ago
  Great find! I guess I will have to wait for that Electrum wallet which supports BCC then, then transfer?
thescriptkiddie 9y ago
Ledger is offering a split tool in their hardware wallets: https://blog.ledger.co/managing-the-bitcoin-cash-fork-7229dde3f358 https://blog.ledger.co/managing-the-bitcoin-cash-fork-7229dd...

jnordwick 9y ago

Not surprisingly, when BCH started, it ran up about $150 and at the same time, BCT fell by a similar amount (approx $2800 to $2650). And as BCH slowly falls, BCT is slowly climbing. Which makes sense if you view this as an equity spin-off. I would expect this relationship to hold -- that for every dollar BCH gains, BCT is prevented from gaining a dollar. Unless somebody has some good reason this wouldn't be the case. At the same time ETH ran up from about $205 to $225.

tlrobinson 9y ago
(I assume you mean BTC not BCT) I would expect the total value to decline if there's not one clear winner, since the value somewhat depends on network effects (e.g. Metcalf's Law)
sobani 9y ago
For posterity it's notable that at this moment BTC is at $2694.88, while BCH is at $691.94. Following your assumption that means that the split increased the total value by about $600! Make of that what you will. :)
- jnordwick 9y ago
  Where did you get that price from because i dont see that BCH has been anywhere close to that since yesterday.
  - sobani 9y ago
    https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin-cash https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin-cash I did happen to write my comment around the top of the price chart, as the current price is $447.

techaddict009 9y ago

Finally BTC has been hard forked and BCH & BTC are live. Some fun facts: Forked should have name XBC as per ISO bt thats already taken so they named BCH 1st BCH block 478559 & BTC Block no 478559 where mined by ViaBTC ViaBTC dedicated BCH block to her daughter by adding comment on 1st Block of BCH "�_M�*/ViaBTC/Welcome to the world, Shuya Yang!/�q��3�0c"

dingo_bat 9y ago
And it was rejected, wasn't it?

Animats 9y ago

That gets the chain un-stuck. The difficulty starts off with the old, huge value. The next difficulty adjustment will be at ceil(478560 / 2016), correct? That's 1248 blocks ahead. Check me on this, please. If mining of that chain is very low, it will take a long time before the difficulty adjusts downward. So far 6 blocks have been mined on that chain.[1] Rate is maybe one per hour, instead of the usual one every 10 minutes. That puts the difficulty adjustment maybe six weeks out. We'll have to see who mines on that chain. The hash rate may go up or down, depending on what the big miners do. Mining will be unprofitable until the next difficulty adjustment, because the price of the coin is lower than the "mainstream" coin. Confirmations will be really slow. After the next adjustment, the chain will work better. Something similar happened to some altcoins. Some big miner mined for a while, made some money, ran up the difficulty adjustment way up, and then stopped. Block generation then stalled. This thing self-adjusts, but adjusts to big changes in hash rate very slowly. [1] http://blockdozer.com/insight/ http://blockdozer.com/insight/

cesarb 9y ago
IIRC, this particular hardfork has a change to allow for fast downward adjustments of its difficulty after just a few blocks, in case too few blocks were found in the last 12 hours. It should already have enough blocks for this special code to get triggered.
- Animats 9y ago
  Here's the code change.[1] "Triggering it require to lose 92% of the hashrate abruptly." That's protection against a total stall. It looks like hash rate is down, but not by that much. It may still take a while to get to the next difficulty adjustment. It's up to the big miners. [1] https://reviews.bitcoinabc.org/D298 https://reviews.bitcoinabc.org/D298
  - Animats 9y ago
    The emergency difficulty adjustment finally tripped, and block times are now around 25 minutes.[1] 40 blocks mined so far, 1208 to the next difficulty adjustment. So about 3 weeks to go until the next regular difficulty adjustment, which should bring block times down to the usual 10 minutes. After that, BCC should function normally. The financial end is a separate issue; that won't be clear until BCC markets are fully functional. [1] https://medium.com/@SimpleCrypto/bitcoin-cash-difficulty-adjustment-results-in-25min-blocks-48cbc1ac004e https://medium.com/@SimpleCrypto/bitcoin-cash-difficulty-adj...

fpgaminer 9y ago

Something very important that I don't see advertised, with regard to BCH. The primary client, BitcoinABC, completely changed consensus rules a mere 5 days before the hardfork: https://github.com/Bitcoin-ABC/bitcoin-abc/blob/174846aaaf564e64b6bd06d679996b52ba86ad53/doc/release-notes/release-notes-0.14.5.md https://github.com/Bitcoin-ABC/bitcoin-abc/blob/174846aaaf56... The important bit: > Enforce strong replay protection (require SIGHASH_FORKID and SCRIPT_VERIFY_STRICTENC compliance) That completely changes the consensus rules of BCH. Again, 5 days before a hardfork. 5 days. I just ... I can't wrap my brain around why _anyone_ in their right mind would think that BCH should be worth anything, if this is the acumen of the development team. Why would any exchange trust the code? Why would users trust the code? If BCH is any kind of experiment, it's not an experiment of big-block vs small block (Bitcoin has had bigger block functionality for over 6 months now). It's an experiment to see if cowboy programmers can patch a live $40 billion network willy nilly and convince everyone that that's okay.

mchristen 9y ago
If anything the fact that things are working as intended(so far) proves that such a change is not nearly as dangerous as BCC developers make it out to be. If you don't trust the code powering BCH then you can simply ignore all your coins on BCH and pretend they don't exist, you're in the exact same situation as you were yesterday. The fear mongering of 'all hard forks are dangerous' is just that, fear mongering, and has no basis in actual reality.
- Misker 9y ago
  I agree with the fearmongering bit, but ignoring BCH is a little more difficult. BCH just caused a pretty decent dip in the price of BTC, and will likely make it drop further. Unless it crashes and burns, in which case faith in Core will be even stronger.
  - zeusk 9y ago
    5% at Bitcoin's level of volatility is not a dip.

mikeschmatz 9y ago

So, if you held 100 BTC before the fork, now you get to have 100BTC + 100BCC? Nice! Can we fork it few more times please? Me likes free money :-)

MINTY1 9y ago

Its quite entertaining reading so many comments on bitcoin and crypto currency ..None of you ,and i mean none of you understand the first thing about the entire concept..while all of you invest in ICOs you have to turn your hard real currency $ /£s etc into bit coin ..creating more blocks to be mined ..THEN YOU SUBSCRIBE TO NEW ICOs ..which if you really looked into them are often run by the same groups of people ..Just check the name and image match on the white papers..the ,the price of that ICI moves an people trade out into BTC ,creating more BTC and whatever coin you have traded mineable ...All of you hoping to get rich ...The miners of course are making money ..usualy using piggy backed IP addresses so they don't use electricity ..The mining systems software sellers are all making..the exchanges are and the miners are ..The bigger the player the more they make and only release small broken quantities onto the market for more to be mined ..the $100 billion value of crypto is not much..But the whole concept is trading currency and information blocks cheaply ..When the mined coins run out ..what will the commission be ,much more than existing ..however all the big players will have made a fortune off all the small players suckers enough to believe the cleverly worked hype of the big players ..NOOne will tell you differently ..But That is why satoshi mined the first million coins ..because he didn't want so much easy coins floating around and also why Vitalik Buterin looks so sad at all ICO meets ..because he suddenly found out he was dealing with organised crime

MINTY1 9y ago

mrfusion 9y ago

I'm confused by all this. What happens if you have a small paper wallet from a few years ago? That means you also have bitcoin cash now?

hossbeast 9y ago
Yes

hughw 9y ago

Does this take the pressure off the planned hard fork for Segwit2x? Big blockers now have what they wanted. Seems like BTC could now be the small-block paradise Core wants.

konschubert 9y ago

Is it possible that all these forks will eventually just become alternative cryptocurrencies just like Etherum or Litecoin? People will use whatever fits their use case and there will be well-oiled exchanges arbitraging the valuations. I'm probably neglecting some of the short term effects of a splitting chain here.

vedoza 9y ago

now bitcoin cash https://www.exchangeratesdata.com/convert/BCH/USD/ https://www.exchangeratesdata.com/convert/BCH/USD/

dorianm 9y ago

Also https://pointsproject.org https://pointsproject.org for those interested in new curriencies