The aftermath of the BTC/BCH split means that the market is less afraid of hard forks.
On the day of the hardfork I facetiously asked on reddit:
what is the limit then? Why don't we do a fork every day? Fuck it, lets continuously compound the shit outta this, and all go buy Maserati's
I meant that as a reductio ad absurdum but if the upcoming 2x split has a similar positive(ish) outcome, we may see the flood gates open as everyone with a half-baked idea on how to improve the network comes out with their own hard-fork.
This raises the question about the so called 21mm hard cap on the number of bitcoins. If the chain can simply be copied to infinity, doesn't that compromise the inflation-resistant properties that made bitcoin so popular amoung people concerned about the inflationary nature of the current financial system?
I do not believe so, space on each particular network will still be limited, and tokens belonging to those networks will thus be valued. But which network will be valued? And who gets to claim the bitcoin 'title'.
People mostly are looking at hash rates and price differences between BTC and BCH and probably plan to do the same thing during the hardfork in November.
These metrics are interesting and important but may I propose another way of measuring who gets the crown; the chain that spawns the most new valuable hardforks. If I esiewert, decided to create a new hardfork years down the road, I would have to choose which chain to split from. I could bcash, bseg or bseg2x. By then the ownership on each chain could be radically different. I will choose whichever one I feel has the most support behind it and / or would be most responsive to whatever changes I propose. Eventually the market will decide on a particular chain as the 'base' from which other forks happen. Speculators will pile into this everytime a fork occurs that has any value, and this chain will have massive value.
Unless I am mistaken the upcoming fork will be from the BTC / core / segwit / bitcoin chain.
HODL on gentlemen, HODL on.