I stopped up reading after the first few paragraphs.
The Bitcoin Core developers wished to adopt 'SegWit', while via the 'Hong Kong' agreement, Roger Ver with his deep pockets wanted to push for a change in the block size - this would result in a separate coin. Let me just point out that the Bitcoin Core developer team are indeed professional developers who have birthed and nurtured Bitcoin from the start. Roger on the otherhand was arrested for illegally selling fireworks online
There is too much argumentum ad verecundiam and argumentum ad hominem in the bitcoin scaling debate. Please try to be a bit more objective.
There are probably lots and lots of issues with this article, just from the quoted paragraph, I have those comments:
- The people who birthed and nurtured Bitcoin was first of all Satoshi, but also Gavin, and to some extent Jeff and Mike Hearn. The current maintainers of the Bitcoin Core project are all second generation developers. You got your facts wrong.
- You're appealing to authority, that's a fallacy, not a valid argument.
- You're implicitly saying that Bitcoin Cash is bad because Roger Ver has sold illegal fireworks. That's also a very big fallacy, it's completely irrelevant.
- You're implicitly saying that Bitcoin Cash only has traction because Roger Ver is a rich person. This could very well be true, but implicit argumentation is also not good. Please be more explicit in your argumentation.
- The "Hong Kong Roundtable Consensus" as well as the "New York Agreement" was basically the miners saying: "we want bigger blocks, you want segwit. We can give you segwit if we get bigger blocks." Roger Ver had no part in that. Again, you have your facts wrong.
I have updated the article based on your feedback. Please remove the flag if you are satisfied with the corrections.
I think the article is still quite one-sided, but I think my reasons to flag it have been fully addressed.
Personally I believe it's a high probability that Bitcoin Cash will fall a lot in value over the next few months (but still have a higher market cap than Litecoin), and a very small probability that Bitcoin will crash and Bitcoin Cash becoming the new Bitcoin. Technically I think Bitcoin Cash is more sound than Bitcoin with Segwit and 1 MB blocks.
The best would be if everyone could just gather around the current compromise: SegWit2X.
Thank you, I'd be happy to take on more feedback for adjustments if you have any. On a side note, do you think the 2mb block increase with segwit will be enough of a change to effectively get people to shift chains?
I'm assuming a lot of people will be thinking that the November hard fork will be much like the August one - where everyone who has Bitcoins and their own keys will receive more free coins. But what is the Hardfork splitting from? - Bitcoin Legacy (without segwit) or the Bitcoin with Segwit?
It's no validation, but bitcoin has hit new highs this morning, as bitcoin cash dropped about 7%.
SegWit is not a 2 MB block size increase. With SegWit, the blocks can actually theoretically go as high as 4 MB, but only if it's filled up with very signature-heavy transactions. People that have analyzed SegWit claims the extra capacity will be somewhere between 1.2x and 1.7x when all transactions are segwit transactions. So far a mere 0.65% of the transactions are segwit transactions. No, the block size increase with SegWit is not at all enough, it's too late, too slow and too little. SegWit2X at the other hand, will give enough capacity to last well into 2018, perhaps all the way to 2019.
Lightning technology is cool, but I believe we'll be in 2019 before it has the necessary outreach - and by then, there is a high risk that virtually all payments are going through some very few big hubs. Lightning is no silver bullet, it's important to keep in mind that it takes two on-chain transactions to open a payment channel, and the channel should be closed as well. Lightning will work very well with microtransactions, I believe it will open up a lot of new use-cases (as well as re-open a lot of use-cases that was possible when the bitcoin fees were lower). We'll see a lot of transactions on the lightning network, but this is mostly new traffic, it's not going to replace the ordinary bitcoin traffic.
I have been wrong before ... but a well-functioning Bitcoin with SegWit and 1 MB base block size, I don't see it happening.
I was selling my Bitcoin Cash very early. I believe the current price is artificially high.
This has nothing to do with the technical details. Whatever Bitcoin can do, there exist alts that can do the same thing better - bitcoin wouldn't be the king of the hill if it was only the technical details that mattered. Bitcoin has three things going for it, it's the network effect, the brand name and (arguably) the strong security offered by miners. Bitcoin Cash has none of those. Still, it is a worthy contender to Litecoin.
In November there is supposed to be a doubling of the base block size (SegWit2X aka New York Agreement aka Silbert accords) - but the developers of Bitcoin Core does not want that to happen. I have tried to make some predictions on what is going to happen in my Bitcoin Forks -
for Dummies article. Note that the "clean split"-scenario is the only "free money"-kind of split.