Quote from: d5000 on May 31, 2017, 06:37:18 PM

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It wouldn't be any different than coinmarketcap. A fork is just a new crypto currency, with the funny property that if you were holding coins on the original chain, you also happen to hold coins on the new one, coins which you may care about, or not. You just get a holding on a new chain if you care to download the wallet. You might just as well not.
This is no different than if one would tell you that you can download, say, a litecoin wallet,

That would only be true in your case where a fork is a minority option not announced well in advance and without substantial community support. Cryptocurrencies are social communities where some kind of "valuable token" is accepted. If the community splits in two parts that are roughly equally important (50/50 to 70/30, for example) then you do have the confusion which chain is the "original one" or the "most supported one". And then you would have all the usability hassles I'm talking about.

Well, I fail to see the difference between the "community" largely opting for a forked coin, or largely opting for another crypto.

The only way in which a "forked" coin becomes the original one, if it is a non-contentious fork, that is, 95% or more of the "community" switches to the new one, and the old chain simply stops. It is indeed somewhat silly to claim that the old, non-existing coin is now the original one, and the new coin is a new crypto currency, no, one MODIFIED the original coin (my idea is that such thing is almost by definition impossible in a truly decentralized system where no collusion occurs between entities).

But apart from "we all agree to modify something and we won't continue to do it the way we did it until now", bringing out a modified version of a coin NEXT TO the original coin or bringing out an entirely NEW COIN, or having people that were using the old coin SWITCH TO ANOTHER (existing) coin are very similar acts.

I fail to see the difference in principle between:

A) I create a totally new alt coin, "bitcoinNew" (with a new genesis block), and most of the people holding bitcoin fall in love with it, and sell their bitcoins to buy bitcoinNew ; but a minority continues to use bitcoin

B) I fork off a totally new alt coin, "bitcoinFork", (which forks off from block 500 000 onward, and, say, has a different PoW scheme), and most people holding bitcoin and hence also bitcoinFork, sell their bitcoin to buy more bitcoinFork, but a minority still continues to use bitcoin

C) I don't do anything, but most people holding bitcoin sell their bitcoin to buy, say, Litecoin, but a minority still continues to use bitcoin.

What does that do to the original bitcoin, except suffer competition ?

EDIT: BTW, I think that in a decentralized system, one cannot talk (by definition) of a "community" because we are supposed to have an eco system of non-colluding entities, contrary to most open source software, for instance, where "community", "cooperation" and "leadership" have a meaning. The whole idea of a decentralized system is to have antagonist entities that cannot collude over any change, because any change is in the advantage of some and the disadvantage of others, given that it is a system with on-purpose scarcity and competition. You cannot have a "community" in a competitive free market either ; every form of significant collusion is called a cartel.