To fork or not to fork - that is the question
August the 1st - it's everywhere: on news, on social media, on YouTube, here on Steemit... The date that everyone is waiting for and everyone is scared of because there will be decision made about the major change in Bitcoin protocol that we all've been waiting for since 2014. The main question that everyone is worried about remains: will Bitcoin fork or not? There certainly are some reasons to be concerned about it, still though there are quite a few logical reasons why Bitcoin hard fork will not happen as well.
Picture taken from cointelegraph.com
Reason 1. - Who is on which side?
In order for hard fork to happen it is necessary to have to sides with different protocol change proposals, moreover - these two sides gotta be 50/50 or at least 40/60 - with other words the amount of support on both sides has to be balanced otherwise the smaller fork would weaken with time until it'd just totally disappear. It is not a secret that main supporter of 2MB hardfork is a chinese corporation Bitmain that owns the largest Bitcoin mining pool and it also manufactures the hardware that is used to mine Bitcoin on their pool (I can smell some centrelization here...). According to Blockchain.info Bitmain owns to date 21,4% of the whole Bitcoin network. There are also other supporters of 2MB block size hard fork - those are mostly smaller pools that together make around 10-15% of whole network. So together with those small pools we have between 30-35% of the Bitcoin network supporting hard fork. That's pretty far away from the 50/50, right?
Reason 2. - What are benefits of forking anyway?
Hard fork brings huge instabilities, prize crashes and chaos that damages the whole ecosystem of a cryptocurrency. In case of Bitcoin we are not just talking Bitcoin, we are talking about the whole cryptocurrency market worth of 100B of dollars. That's kind of a lot of money invested that cannot be disappear just like that. The only reason why the Bitcoin fork is even considered as an option is Bitmain's greed after bigger profits and lust after centralized/monopolized Bitcoin. It was confirmed that SegWit implementation brings a patch update of some code mistakes which allowed Bitmain to mine empty blocks and get 20% more profit with their mining hardware.
Reason 3. - If the fork is gonna happen how long would it last? With SegWit implemented Bitmain would loose significant ammount of it's income and that's what makes them act against it so much. Still though - even if Bitmain could somehow manage to activate hard fork, would that help them get their income back? The 30% of the network that is owned by monopoly and nobody else with old protocol, no support no users... am I missing something or it's just too obvious that this would not work?
Personal opinion: Fact is - there are too many people involved and too much money invested in Bitcoin and there is no way anyone is gonna let the system collapse by a hard fork. If the SegWit implementation happens (which I am pretty sure is going to happen) we would probably see Bitcoin reach 4K and maybe even 5K by the end of the year.
I hope I've managed to give you enough good reasons to calm down and look at the whole situation from a different angle. Join me to relax and wait for Bitcoin to reach the moon in the upcoming years :)
@lifipp great thoughts and conclusions. It is so not wise to eat the hand that is feeding you :)) I mean Bitmain and Bitcoin. If they put profit in front of network healt they could end up with nothing. Greed is never good :)
Hey @yuriks2000 thanks for feedback! :)