Last Updated on December 31, 2020 by cryptocreed
Forks Ahoy, why we will probably see a lot more forks
Why all these forks? I have been asking myself the same question for a while. With Bitcoin Cash in September and now the coming Bitcoin Gold, it seems that there is a number of people all looking to fork Bitcoin.
How an altcoin like Bitcoin Cash has amassed a 5.2 Billion Dollar market cap[1] (as of October 11, 2017) nearly overnight is quite a feat, and being that it is not much more than a Bitcoin clone that makes it even more impressive; but it begs the question: “With Bitcoin Cash, soon Bitcoin Gold, and certainly more on the way; what will become of all these forks and how will they affect Bitcoin’s price?”
For those who don’t know what a fork is, a fork is when somebody takes open source software (in this case it would be Bitcoin), changes it to their liking, and then releases it as an alternative to its original base (in this case it’s an altcoin). They are often created when a community is divided and splits, although in most cases most of the community sides in one direction and the fork eventually fade into obscurity.
Without getting into too much detail, Bitcoin Cash is a “fork” of bitcoin which increases the blockchain size to 8 megabytes and does not include segwit[2]. It was created because of the scaling wars that were going on over the summer and forked in august. fork ahoy Overall it really doesn’t change much else, but yet is holding value and people seem to expect that to stay the same. If you are interested in checking out Bitcoin Cash more then I would recommend you check out Bitcoin Cash’s Website: bitcoincash.org.
Without getting into too much detail, Bitcoin Gold is a “fork” of bitcoin that claims to try to further decentralize mining by implementing a new algorithm that will make it easier for an average user to mine Bitcoin[3]. That’s a pretty small change if you ask me, and yet people are still expecting it to hold a market cap.
So what am I getting at? Well, it seems to me that both Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin Gold are pretty useless altcoins (or at least that is how it appears to me), but they both are expected to have a very large value. Once people start catching on I am guessing that tons of people will start trying to fork Bitcoin to get their own slice of this digital pie. With that happening, I think it will create a lot of instability in the Bitcoin community (and thus instability in Bitcoin’s price), which will ultimately hurt altcoins and make any future Bitcoin forks almost worthless. fork ahoy
Disclaimer: I (the author) do believe what I wrote, however, there’s always a chance that somebody is wrong, and I’m no exception. Please don’t rely solely on me for information or trading advice.
