Hello fellow steemian friends, so today i want to talk about something really important that everybody that owns btc should know about.
BTC will split but not in the way everybody was afraid of, this is a forced split by a minority of people aka Roger Ver very well known in the btc world.
He is an early investor in bitcoin related startups since 2011, the first investment he made was for Charlie Shrems's Bitinstant, he invested in Ripple, Blockchain.info, Blockpay and Kraken. All of this well known in the crypto world..
This week he announced that he would force a split in the chain, not that it will affect the main chain, which was what everybody was afraid of, it's something that anybody could do by their own, just grab the current chain, split it and run a node with different "rules".
But if anybody without the power that he owns did it probably nobody would even notice it, but he HAS the power to do something that a lot of people will eventually hear about.
So what do btc owners need to know?
-This will NOT be the main bitcoin, this will be considered as another alt coin called BCC or BCH(the main name is Bitcoin Cash)
-Well first of all do NOT transfer bitcoins between addresses on 1st of aug as bitcoin core devs already advised.
-There will be a fork in the chain on 1st of aug. and anybody with any btc on their possession will get the same in this new coin, so it's a 1:1 ratio
-You should get your coins on supported exchanges or in your own wallet(trezor, Ledger or some local wallet) to get the new alt coin
What are the main differences from the "normal" bitcoin?
-8MB blocks:
The main generation of bitcoin only allows 3 transactions/s because of it's limitation of 1MB/block which will be "fixed" on the segwit activation
-Offers replay and wipeout protection:
The chain cannot be reversed as it uses a transaction signature that is slightly different from the main chain, so transactions cannot be reversed and no confusion will happen bettween the two chains.
-The mining difficulty will be adjusted way quicker than the main bitcoin:
Now the difficulty is adjusted every 2016 blocks, while in the new alt coin it will be adjusted a lot faster, like every 6 blocks faster.
This fork can be a good deal to get some free money, this new alt coin that doesn't even exist yet and it is trading on futures and currently evaluated at 475$ on ViaBTC which is owned by Roger Ver(do you remember him? yeah the guy that is creating this new coin)
What are my personal thoughts? Well if you go and see what happened to eth and etc ( i know it is kind of a different sittuation ) but on the first days of trading between the two of them etc reached 45% of the value of eth on poloniex, i don't believe this situation will happen so dramatically on btc and bitcoin cash, but i can see a potential 10% or 20% on the first days, which can be a great deal for many people, to get 10 or 20% of their btc holdings just for free. And why do i see this? Because Roger Ver will almost 100% sure try to pump his own coin into adoption, and for that he needs that the value doesn't reach 0.00001% of bitcoin value in the first days or weeks, otherwise people will just dump it and move on, and he has the means for it, he has a lambo right?!
The main things to look about this coin adoption is mining, if it's only viabtc mining it, it will be garbage, and value, if it goes to gummy bears value nobody will care.
So if you want to get your free coins, the main exchanges supporting it so far are bitfinex, kraken and bittrex. Bitstamp and coinbase for now they will NOT give you bitcoin cash for your bitcoin holdings.
On bitfinex i've read that if you borrowed coins it wont count, but if you're just lending them it will count for you.
And for ending this article, i think there will be a huge pump in price for btc until 1st of aug, because everybody wants free coins, nobody will transfer btc on 1st of aug, so there are no reasons to sell until then.
Sources:
Bitfinex
Kraken
Bitcointalk
Wikipedia
Medium
ViaBTC