BTC bifurcation is good
About bitcoin, the news is flying all over the world these two days
specifically, a foundation called BTN foundation announced that it has set up a bitcoin bifurcated development team to launch a new bitcoin bifurcated BTN. Now its official website is online, which is called btn.kim. Two days later, bitgo, another bitcoin development team, announced that it would fork out from bitcoin. Its name is BTF, which literally means "bitcoin faith"
according to Yao yuan, a well-known bitcoin columnist, bitcoin will "have 10 children" in December, and will at least bifurcate out of 10 "children" such as BCX, SBTC and LBTC
as soon as these things happened, the bitcoin market began to fluctuate again, some investors blew up, and all kinds of rumors came out: why so many forks? Is bitcoin out of order
in fact, the bifurcating of bitcoin is far more complicated than what it shows. If we don't explain its historical background clearly, we really can't understand what happened
< b > the origin of bifurcations: the origin of the bifurcations of bitcoin has existed. The so-called bifurcations refer to the accounting differences caused by different underlying protocols. According to Xue Hongyan, director of the Internet financial center of Suning Financial Research Institute, bitcoin is jointly maintained by a number of point-to-point decentralized nodes. The orderly operation of the whole system depends on the consensus of all nodes, that is, there is a set of recognized standards for key issues such as which transactions are acceptable and which nodes have accounting rights. This set of standards is deployed in the underlying protocol of blockchain and implemented automatically
but nodes are operated by people after all, which is the so-called "miner", but everything operated by people will be different. For example, the miners of some nodes go online every day, while the miners of some nodes go online occasionally; Some nodes are in the eastern hemisphere, some nodes are in the Western Hemisphere... In a word, e to various reasons, over time, bitcoin has different underlying protocols in different nodes
if different versions of underlying protocols are running in a node, different standards will appear, which will result in bifurcation. If the nodes can deal with these version differences and finally form a unified standard, the bifurcation will eventually disappear, which is called soft bifurcation. If the difference cannot be eliminated, when some nodes continue to run different versions of the protocol, the bifurcation will continue, which is called hard bifurcation
it's easy to solve the problem of soft bifurcation, that is, if the account book is wrong, just modify it. Hard bifurcations are not easy to solve. No one thinks he is wrong and explains them according to his own standards. In the end, he can only go his own way and keep his own account. At present, bitcoin bifurcation refers to hard bifurcation
< b > the first bifurcations: the first hard bifurcations of bitcoin technology upgrade are purely technical reasons. The settlement performance of bitcoin itself is limited. According to the original technical agreement, bitcoin can only support up to seven settlements per second. This was not a problem in the early days. With the fire of bitcoin, more and more people flocked in, and the settlement became more frequent than ever. At this time, the original technology was not enough
therefore, in the middle of 2017, some miners proposed new technology agreements, but the other miners did not agree with them. Eventually, both sides held one end and ran their own underlying agreements, which was the first bifurcation in the history of bitcoin
However, with the development of bitcoin trading means, speculators graally regard the bifurcation as a means of money collection, which leads to a great change in the nature of the current bifurcationthe principle is that each bifurcation is essentially equivalent to the issue of a new digital currency, which is linked to bitcoin. The target audience is larger than the general ICO, and it is easier to be accepted by ordinary users than issuing a new digital currency directly
because the team that creates this kind of bifurcation takes the lead, it is very easy to control the transaction of the new currency, especially in the early stage, and it only needs a small cost to control the price trend of the whole currency. This leaves a lot of room for speculation. The forked team only needs to make the new currency accepted by the users, and then it can artificially raise the price to a sky high price. After the real users come in, they can sell all the money they hoard, and get high profits out of thin air
on October 25 this year, a domestic team forked out bitcoin gold (BTG). Two days before the forking, Jiang Zhuoer, CEO of leibitchi, denounced the forking as money looping: "Liao Xiang, founder of BTG, had g 200000 BTG coins in advance before the forking, and wanted to convert them into 20000 bitcoins, looping 80 million yuan."
The advantage of bifurcations can be seen, so that the word "bifurcations create value" has become popular in the field of currency speculation. For this reason, a new word "IFO" - first token issue has been derivedHe Sheng, a well-known financial blogger, once told the media that most of the so-called IFO may evolve into the operation of collecting money by harvesting leeks. "Many previous ICOS are doing IFO, and ICO needs to write a white paper and go to the stock exchange to gain market recognition, while IFO does not even need to write a white paper."
this also explains why bitcoin is becoming more and more profitable. To put it bluntly, everyone wants Nakamoto
Can< b > not bifurcate
whether it's Hong shuning of Suning finance, or Mike & Chen, CEO of bitgo, a bitcoin wallet software provider and one of the project leaders of segwit2x; Mike belshe, the instry actually refuses this bifurcation of bitcoin. In fact, real blockchain practitioners have always hated speculation. At present, the leading enterprises in the domestic blockchain instry have clearly expressed their opposition to the overflow of bitcoin bifurcation. For example, when Xunlei launched the first popular blockchain project in China, its CEO Chen Lei said in an interview: "Xunlei opposes all speculative activities using blockchain, so it is definitely against bitcoin for the purpose of speculation and leek cutting arbitrage."
However, to solve this problem, it is not enough to have an attitude alone, but to have specific means. The best way is not to let bitcoin bifurcatethis is difficult to achieve. Bitcoin's own technology is a relatively primitive blockchain technology with limited computing power. It can barely cope with the previous transaction scale. In view of the current situation of bitcoin fire, it is difficult to support. So sooner or later bitcoin will have to solve the problem of its own computing power
but there is no hope at all. With the innovation of blockchain technology, there will always be some new ways. For example, the shared computing proposed by Xunlei can effectively improve the total amount of computing power and rece the cost per unit of computing power without changing the existing hardware facilities. If bitcoin is combined with shared computing, it can effectively solve the problem of bitcoin's computing power limit without new bifurcation
secondly, the bifurcations for the purpose of cutting Chinese chives can be supervised by means of supervision. For example, compared with the real name system of special currency wallet, the real name system of transactions can effectively prevent the risk of Financial Bureau. At present, the real name system has been implemented in some blockchain projects, and has achieved good results. For example, Xunlei's blockchain is the first blockchain application to introce the real name system in China, which basically eliminates the hidden danger of malicious speculation
in a word, there is a way. It depends on whether bitcoin players accept it or not, and there is a process to implement it. It takes time. Therefore, at this stage, it is better for us to stay away from the bifurcations of bitcoin in various names
The capacity of a block in bitcoin is 1m (megabytes). A transaction is between 250 and 500 bytes
according to this algorithm, a block contains about 4194.3 transactions
the confirmation time of a block in bitcoin is 10 minutes, so the seven transactions that a block can process per second may sometimes be less than seven
What are the consequences The bifurcations of 
bitcoin are divided into hard bifurcations and soft bifurcations
hard fork means that when the block format or transaction format of bitcoin changes, the UN upgraded nodes refuse to verify the blocks proced by the upgraded nodes
the upgraded nodes can verify the blocks proced by the non upgraded nodes, and they continue the chain they think is correct, so they are divided into two chains
What is soft bifurcationsoft bifurcation means that when the data structure of bitcoin transaction changes,
UN upgraded nodes can verify the blocks proced by upgraded nodes,
and upgraded nodes can also verify the blocks proced by UN upgraded nodes
In the discussion of blockchain, bitcoin and other digital currencies, we often hear the word "bifurcation". So what is bifurcation? What is the effect of bifurcation
blockchain
before talking about bifurcation, popularize a little knowledge of blockchain, so as to help us understand what bifurcation is more easily (if you don't have any concept of blockchain, please read my previous articles, which are all popular words to help you understand what blockchain is)
blockchain, as the name suggests, is a chain composed of blocks. Of course, this kind of chain is just a figurative metaphor. To put it bluntly, data blocks are connected orderly. In bitcoin, the transaction records of bitcoin are stored in the block. The size of the block and the space occupied by the transaction records determine how many transactions can be stored in a block. These transaction records are packaged into blocks, and then the blocks are connected one by one to form a blockchain
We know that bitcoin software, like other software, needs to be updated and modified regularly in order to make it better. So a new version will appear, but not everyone will download the new version, so one miner will run the old version, and some will run the new version. If the old and new versions are not compatible, the blockchain will bifurcate. Because there may be differences between the version blocks and the old version blocks, they cannot be connected to the same blockchain, so there will be two or even more chains, which is called bifurcation
soft forking
soft forking refers to that when the new consensus rules are released, nodes that have not been upgraded will proce illegal blocks because they do not know the new consensus rules, resulting in temporary forking. This kind of bifurcation will be graally repaired with the upgrading of nodes
hard fork
hard fork refers to the permanent divergence of the blockchain. After the release of the new consensus rules, some nodes that have not been upgraded cannot verify the blocks proced by the upgraded nodes, and usually hard fork occurs. Therefore, in the field of digital currency, hard bifurcation often leads to the emergence of new currencies. For example, the hard bifurcation of Ethereum led to the emergence of eth
What is bifurcation? What is bitcoin bifurcationbitcoin bifurcations are mainly divided into two types: hard bifurcations and soft bifurcations
the main supporters of hard bifurcations are China's bitcoin community, bitcoin Jesus, Gavin and other bigwigs. That is to say, the expansion faction insists on large blocks, does not expand the main chain, and nothing else. Hard bifurcation has the risk of splitting bitcoin, but once the main chain is split, it will kill the small chain coin
the main supporters of soft bifurcation are the core team and the BS company behind it. The main chain does not change and the functions of the main chain are distributed to the side chain. This will develop bitcoin into a better settlement system, but the main chain will be graally marginalized. Some people doubt that this is to kill bitcoin and benefit some companies.
At present, foreign bitcoin trading platforms show that the peak value of bitcoin trading price has exceeded the US $7400 mark, and it is also a wave to US $7500. At the same time, bitcoin cash (BCH) is also rising with the tide
it seems that the rise of bitcoin price drives the whole money market, so there is the rise of bitcoin cash; But is that really the case
in fact, bitcoin cash is different from bitcoin. The biggest difference is that the block capacity of the blockchain is 8m; Similarly, it does not recognize segwit, which is a new branch of bitcoin compared with the capacity of the original 1m bitcoin block
user needs also determine the price
whether it's real goods or the digital currency virtual goods we are talking about, it's just with user needs that they are created. Although the price of bitcoin cash (BCH) has been hovering around $300 before, from the current price of bitcoin, there is still a lot of room for the rise of bitcoin cash (BCH); Is the rise of bitcoin's cash price not in the form of user demand
BCH has great development prospects
BCH is the digital currency most in line with the original heart of bitcoin
the original intention of Nakamoto's design of bitcoin is to be a kind of currency widely used by human beings, a point-to-point currency which is different from the current legal currency system and cannot be eliminated by power. In order to achieve this goal, bitcoin network must keep the transaction fees at a very low level, so that all users feel indifferent; The second is to give users a stable confirmation expectation, that is, 10 minutes to confirm. But now bitcoin is off track. Bitcoin cash (BCH) is based on this point-to-point e-cash system to improve
increase in computing power
the rise in the price of bitcoin cash is also inseparable from the mining computing power of bitcoin cash. With the increase of the mining difficulty of bitcoin and the decrease of the mining difficulty of BCH, the miners think that it will be easier to dig BCH, and it is more profitable to dig bitcoin cash (BCH) than bitcoin, so the computing power will switch to BCH. With the rising price of BCH, digging BCH will become more profitable
bitcoin will be bifurcated again, which is good for BCH
bitcoin will be bifurcated again in November, which is good for bitcoin cash. Because the consensus of the bitcoin community is not consistent, bitcoin is likely to become two kinds of coins after the bifurcation in November. The newly generated bitcoin with the capacity expanded to 2M and the non expanded bitcoin will compete for the naming right of "bitcoin". The fight for naming right will bring great economic chaos and replay attack, which is a threat to users' assets. Some users will move to the bitcoin cash (BCH) camp in order to preserve their assets. If segwit2x hard fork fails in November, bitcoin cash (BCH) will be used as a solution for bitcoin expansion, and will gain more users' support e to its own advantages. Therefore, before the bifurcations of bitcoin come, some investors will invest in BCH to avoid risks, which will also cause a wave of rise
the continuous improvement of bitcoin cash (BCH)
there have been many supporters since BCH came into being. With the continuous development of BCH, many trading platforms, infrastructure, businesses have joined the BCH camp. Because BCH has the advantages of low transaction fees and reliable transaction confirmation that bitcoin does not have at present, it is inevitable for BCH to recover the territory lost by BTC e to transaction congestion and soaring costs in the future. At present, BCH community has been comparable with BTC community
BCH's surge is inevitable. Because the emergence of goods is to meet people's needs BCH, as a point-to-point e-cash system which is most in line with Nakamoto's idea, is very promising. With the development of time, it is possible for BCH to surpass BTC in price as well as in value