Are you Planning a Bitcoin Hard fork? Please reduce the confusion
The Bitcoin Cash fork has proven to me that some investors and particularly newcomers to Bitcoin are the most at risk of being confused. Let’s establish where I want to lead the conversation with this Tweet from https://twitter.com/MadBitcoins:
When Litecoin was created by Charlie Lee, he designed Litecoin addresses to start with L, making it distinct from Bitcoin (which starts with 1) and hence limit any confusion to new investors entering the crypto world.
By definition, making such a change requires a hard fork, as it is required to upgrade both wallets and nodes. When a group of developers, led by Roger Ver, decided to create a hard fork out of Bitcoin with a 8 Mbytes block, it was pretty clear there was no consensus in the Bitcoin community and therefore, we would be dealing with 2 Bitcoin versions post fork. As such, this would require wallets to be updated to handle the hard fork version (Bitcoin Cash in this case). {Note that, if the entire Bitcoin community agreed to the fork, only nodes would have had to upgrade, not the wallets}. But since wallets had to as well in order to handle the new hard fork coin, why not making a slight adjustment to the Bitcoin Cash address format to avoid any confusion to users. Rather than leaving the Bitcoin cash addresses in the same format as Bitcoin, they should have also implemented a structure in which any new Bitcoin Cash address would start with anything but 1 or 3 (like it is for Bitcoin classic).
I understand Bitcoin Cash developers are claiming Bitcoin Cash is The Bitcoin and will become so eventually, hence claiming the right to keep the existing address format. But the developers and backers of Bitcoin Core/Classic are making the same claim. Since classic wasn’t going through a Hard fork requirement (hence no upgrade required) while Bitcoin Cash required a forced upgrade by all nodes, the Bitcoin address format should have been changed to avoid any confusion. Keeping the address format for branding purpose at the cost of generating “collateral damage” (lost bitcoins) to end users was a big mistake in my opinion, which should be avoided in the future. As such here is some advice:
If you intend to make a Bitcoin Hard Fork and you don’t have a 100% consensus, please create a new address format!
If that had been the case, anytime someone wanted to move his original bitcoin cash stored in a bitcoin address from prior to the fork, the new address generated out of the Bitcoin cash Wallet software would have been distinct from it and hence, minimize such issues as in the tweet from Mad Bitcoins, particularly when sending them to an exchange where the user has no control on the private keys.
On another note, if you decide to create a fork and strongly believes it is a better version of the original, you should be confident it will win in the end. On that basis, one could easily recommend, in order to reduce confusion even more, to use a much different logo and perhaps even a name. But I understand it’s all about getting as much as possible of the network effect which might be diluted by rebranding. The network effect does include the user base, but also the developers and infrastructure. Not all will follow. But again, in the end, the best crypto currency should succeed. Or perhaps both.
Happy investing!
Phil Champagne, currently vacationing in Palm Springs.
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