TO FORK OR NOT TO FORK? BITCOINS UPCOMING LONG AWAITED SCALEING FORK DECISION, AND WHY YOU IT IS SO IMPORTANT

  Hello my fellow Steemians.   

I thought I would share with you today an important situation that has been brewing for the past two years or so in Bitcoin. First lets talk a little bit about Bitcoin for a moment. Bitcoins value is in its brand name. It is the most well known brand out of all the Cryptocurrencies, and is seen as an alternate store of value to fiat currency and other asset classes.  Bitcoins brand was born off the back of the GFC in 2009, as an answer to some of the major fears: What if I can’t withdraw money out of my banking institution. And even worse, what if my government decides to confiscate some or all of my savings and assets? (This actually occurred in Cyrpus in 2013, where the Cypriot govt actually froze all bank withdrawls across the country, and then resolved that in order to pay back all of its debt, took 10% out of everyones bank savings account!)   

Bitcoins blockchain and blockchain miners: 

Bitcoins transactions data is stored on what is called a blockchain. Think of the block chain as an enormous Accounts ledger. Although this ledger is distributed across the whole network, and not centralised at one location, or server. When you add in the fact that all of the transactions are Cryptographically secured, it becomes almost impossible (with current computing power) to hack or change any of the transactions on the blockchain. The block chain stores zipped up compressed and secured (cryptographically) versions of transactional data across the ledger in what is called a “hash”. Those hash are blocks of transactional data that  are “mined” (calculated by “miners” computers)  and then added to the blockchain. Miners compete with each other to complete / hash the next block of transactions, called a “block”. And as a reward for completing a block, a miner will receive payment in Bitcoin. In Addition to this, Bitcoin has a makes it more challenging as more transactions are added to the blockchain, to “mine” the next block. This mechanism was put in place to slow down the issuance of more Bitcoin into the economy.    

Moving on to the upcoming Hard or Soft Fork Decision: 

OK, so fast forwarding to the present. The Bitcoin Miners and Developers are going to make a long awaited (this is two years in the making) decision to either “Hard fork” Bitcoin, or “Soft Fork” Bitcoin. This will occur on the 31st of July 2017.   What is a Hard Fork A Hardfork is a software upgrade that is not backwards compatible with the previous version. The problem with this is that if a group of miners want to stick with the old software version, and the other group wants to stick with the new version, then what will happen is Bitcoin will essentially be split into two different coins.  

What is a Soft Fork: 

By contrast, a Soft fork is a backward compatible upgrade. Segwit (Segregated Witness) is the Soft fork in question. Segwit basically doubles the number of transactions that the Bitcoin network can process per second, and a couple of other tweeks.   

So why is this decision so important?  

This decision is important because if Bitcoin ends up initiating a hard fork scenario, Bitcoin will be split into 2 coins. Holders of Bitcoin will essentially lose a portion of their value through the split. This will also create a lot of fear in the markets, and you could also possibly see the abandonment of Bitcoin. People will permanently lose faith in its brand, and this will definitely have a negative plague like effect on the whole Crypto Currency Sphere. So if your looking at purchasing Bitcoins or any other Crypto Currency right now, you could either wait until after this occurs, or take a gamble between now and then and hope that the Hard fork option is not chosen, and that the price will rise after July 31. 

Either way, thanks for listening, and I’ll see you next time