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Topic
Board Development & Technical Discussion
Merits 1 from 1 user
Re: Question about soft and hard fork
by
Kogs
on 20/09/2017, 08:51:27 UTC
⭐ Merited by ETFbitcoin (1)
Interesting! In your opinion, how has the btc fork affected the bitcoin community so far? any concerns in the future? Thanks in advance for your opinion

Good question. From the sources I receive my information from I get the feeling, that the majority of interested bitcoin users (people who follow bitcoin news, are somehow active on twitter/reddit or here in this forum) have closed the case Bitcoin Cash. This topic is not that hot anymore as both sides have their preferred solution now and are more or less happy with it.

The segwit2x topic is much more a topic at the moment as it will produce another hardfork in November. None of the sides really want to split Bitcoin again, but the positions on both sides are cemented. No one want to move towards the other side. So I think a split will definitely happen. The big fight until this split will be, who can convince the majority of miners, nodes, users, eco system etc. for their side.

The segwit2x fork will definitely create more chaos as the 2x supporter don't plan to implement a replay protection. Experienced Bitcoin users might not have a problem with it, because there are ways to safely split their coins in case of the fork, but the average user might not have the knowledge to do it. And people who never heard before about that fork may lose some money because of missing replay protection. Also people who don't control their own private keys, might not get access to their new "free" coins.

So, my biggest concern is the missing replay protection. The real support for one of the two sides we will only see after the fork happened. Hard to predict the future.
Also I'm concerned that in future this kind of forks could become common practice. I think this could weaken the Bitcoin brand in the worst case.

In terms of Bitcoin, I think the Bitcoin Core developers and their supporters have done more "proof of work" for their side, than the segwit2x developers/community.