Bitcoin is Getting Hard Fork Twice this Time, Major Complications Ahead, BE AWARE BE SAFE
We all know about previous hard fork of bitcoin which provided us with Bitcoin Cash. Although most people did not support this split, still bitcoin cash manages to be around with us.
This time bitcoin is getting hard fork twice, which means two more bitcoins will be seen in the market by the mid of November 2017. I came across with some complications ahead with bitcoin hard forks happening this time.
Bitcoin Gold (Hard Fork at Block No. 491407)
Major purpose of Bitcoin gold is to decentralize mining. This is one of the reasons Bitcoin Gold is coming up on Equihash Algorithm.
Since Equihash is ASIC proof, There will be no ASIC miners built to mine bitcoin gold, It's the same as we see in Ethereum Mining. By doing that developers are taking charge back from the mining companies and giving the mining power back to individual people by providing the mining on GPUs instead of ASICs.
This hard fork is expected to be released on October 25th 2017.
Bitcoin Segwit2x (Hard Fork at Block No. 494784)
This is a major hard fork and most complicated one for Bitcoin this time. As when this happens both the teams working on both sides of bitcoin wants to keep the legendary name Bitcoin.
Segwit2x is to expand blocksize even more, although some of bitcoin core developers support this change and some of them are rejecting it. This is going to be a very huge dispute with the complication we might not ready for. With this, as both are fighting to be the real Bitcoin, this chain split might end up with "Replay Attack". Call it a loop hole or a bug but this is not good for bitcoin future unless this matter gets resolved.
What is Replay Attack?
Since both the coins want to be the legendary "Bitcoin" on the same chain, resulting leaving kind of a loop hole. Lets try to understand with a live example.
If you have one bitcoin, after the chain split as we know, we get similar amount of bitcoin on the split chain, which means after hard fork you'll be having 1 Bitcoin and 1 Bitcoin Segwit 2x.
If you decide to send some Bitcoin to someone, that person can take that transaction raw data and broadcast it to Bitcoin Segwit 2x chain resulting similar amount of Bitcoin Segwit will be sent as well automatically. This is the case of visa versa. Any transaction happening on one chain split can be repeated to the other chain split.
This would be very risky for anyone to make any transactions on bitcoin especially from November 2017. untill we see both sides reaching to a conclusion, This is something can take bitcoin value down, due to more and more people getting aware of this and understanding the risk of spending either bitcoin or bitcoin segwit 2x.
What do you guys think of this? what is going to happen according to you? please let me know in the comment section below.
I would like to mention the steps @themystic has mentioned in comments on what should we do when 2x hard fork happens in November:
We need to be cautious but I think best thing we could do is the following:
- Your Bitcoins should be offline and you should have the private key.
- Do not touch your private key until the 2x wallet is released.
- Only when 2x wallet is released, immediately transfer a very small amount (negligible amount) of your original Bitcoins (BTC) to a new address. Assuming delays it may take time. Wait.
- Keep watching 2x coins on 2x chain through the explorer which would be available by then.
- Once you are sure you have the full balance on 2x chain, move all funds to new 2x address from the old address. This should be quick assuming lesser transaction than original Bitcoin.
- Now immediately move your original Bitcoin balance to the new address where you moved the partial Bitcoins as per step 3.
- Assuming BGold has replay protection we may either leave the BGold balance in the same address or move it to new address as per our wish.
@bunnychum. You are a new discovery for me. This is the best explanation I have found about the up coming forks.
I have a question, - the anawer seems to be obvious - but I would like a little more granularity:
You wrote:
Does this mean that I could start mining on my home PC or Mac, or even better become a node? (Maybe that’s the same thing?).
Or is the reality that in practice I would be overwhelmed by millions of other miners and I would never actually earn anything?
@swissclive this is an excellent question actually... Let me try my best to answer this...
According to me it always depends upon which GPU hardware you are choosing to mine on your PC or Mac and respectively, how much MH/s it generates...
Since Equihash is ASIC proof, we can fairly say that there are very less chances for mining difficulties to go way up higher like whats happening with Bitcoin and Dash... Although even if does go higher it would be distributed, would not happen something like ASICs are coming with more and more speed...
Hope that answers your question, please let me know if i missed something...
I do not plan on making any transactions in the near future so hopefully I'm covered.
ofcourse @sirstacksalot no transactions no replay attacks... :)
Thanks for spreading this awareness as there are many bad actors involved in such political stunts in crypto space. BGold should be fine as they are planning to have Replay protection by modifying the transaction data structure. But we need to be careful about 2x coins because they might not have Replay protection to hamper Bitcoin's image and trying to replace them with the Bitcoin.
We need to be cautious but I think best thing we could do is the following:
These steps are my suggestions from the limited knowledge I have. Though do your own due diligence to make sure you are safely protecting your investments. Cheers!!!
@themystic thank you for this amazing input... I completely agree with your suggestions, also adding it to my post by mentioning your name as well as up-voting this comment... Also following you...
Thanks mate. Just doing my little to spread the awareness.
It's really a shame seeing such politics by few bad actors in this space trying to demean the original Bitcoin. Even BCash team is supporting 2x though it has no replay protection. I used to follow Roger Ver but after seeing his bad intentions I have started educating myself by following people like Andreas Antonopoulos and Charlie Lee. After SEGWIT these guys were upset as they did centralize the whole mining operations. Craig Wright, Roger Ver, Ayers are millionaires with shady past. We have to be careful else these greedy people would fool us with our hard earned investment.
Invest wisely, keep the space healthy and aware by always lending a helping hand. Cheers...
Nice article with a much needed information. I was wondering about the upcoming hardforks!
Nice article with a much needed information. I was wondering about the upcoming hardforks!
I'm a little confused about what you say here:
"With this, as both are fighting to be the real Bitcoin, this chain split might end up with "Reply Attack"."
A replay attack should only happen if you spend / move your coins. If you just let them sit where they are, you should be safe. Wait until the dust settles.
@bunnychum although it's called a 'Replay Attack' this is a great post. I completely agree with your concerns and worry for those people that are new to investing in Bitcoin or CryptoCurrency in general that they are not prepared for the various pitfalls and risks associated with these monumental changes.
Bitcoin Cash wasn't a problem, but I think people are incorrectly comparing this to Bitcoin Gold and Segwit 2x. They are worlds apart in comparison and there could be a lot of damage done to Bitcoin over the next month.
Look at the price of Vertcoin the last few days. I said a while back that if any currency should be adopted by the masses for GPU mining, Vertcoin should get that vote of confidence.
Anyway, thanks again for your insightful and informative post! I will resteem it and follow.
@cryptomagic Thank you for correcting me, i miss spelled... following you too...
Great post @bunnychum. Yes, it's too confusing for new people in crypto space when such forks happen. It creates lots of confusion into noobs mind.
I really appreciate the steps you have provided for taking necessary actions during these forks. This post is informative and thanks again for educating new people in the space like me.
Following you now.
GOLDEN ADVICE : Bitcoin is going to fall after novemeber, december timeframe (after people have have been rewarded with forked currencies of Bitcoin.
So buy other cryptocurrencies now which are down a bit. And sell your bitcoins.. after the forking era, buy bitcoins because thats when its value will be down. So thats a win win for everyone..
if you are still not understanding the future value of BTC then you are fool..
@jahid289 I do believe in Bitcoin, if you care to check my profile you'd see that i have done conferences/seminars on Bitcoin to make people understand the potential.
This post is about the upcoming fork and it's complications with the things we need to care about. Kindly read the full post and let me know what you think.