My Coin Journey
I am really new to cryptocurrency and have only been actively trading for a couple of weeks. My first week was spent researching different exchanges, transfers speeds, reputations, and settling on Coinbase for my initial investment. After the week-long torment of waiting for my coins to actually hit the online wallet, I split my tokens between GDAX and BINANCE. The majority stayed in GDAX because the zero cost of limit buy/sell. I immediately fell in love with this feature. A small amount went to BINANCE to diversify my investment into altcoins.
The Chosen
After purchasing the big three (BTC, LTC, ETH) on Coinbase, I began to pick a few altcoins. The order doesn't really matter but just know that it's slightly exhilarating to see gains in such a small time period. I collected LEND, GAS, XVG, XRP, TNB, ARN, and IOT. Being such a noob, has me constantly checking my balances and strategizing. I know would say HODL but I have been burned in stocks before and currently have a few bad stocks sitting in Fidelity account waiting for a rebound. Maybe one day... nevermind.
Unexpected Deposit
While checking my BINANCE balance, I saw SBTC and BCX, two new coins that I had not purchased. The presence of SuperBitcoin / SBTC and Bitcoin X/BCX confused me all weekend until I read the following statement from BINANCE...
"Binance has completed the distribution of SuperBitcoin (SBTC) and Bitcoin X (BCX). You can login and check that the SBTC and BCX has been credited to your account.
As previously announced, the distribution of SBTC (at a rate of 1 BTC: 1 SBTC) and BCX (at a rate of 1 BTC: 10,000 BCX) was based on a snapshot of BTC balances at Block 498,888, which was taken at 10:29:53 AM (UTC) on 2017/12/12."
The complete statement can be read at https://support.binance.com/hc/en-us/articles/115003414491-Binance-Distributes-SBTC-and-BCX
Although these coins cant be traded yet, they will be in the future as soon as BINANCE has faith in their blockchain. That's cool but where did they come from? The answer is simple for those who understand block chain but I decided to research a little further.
Hard Fork
SBTC and BCX are newer interations or hard forks of the bitcoin that we have been hearing about nonstop for the last month. According to investopedia, a hard fork is
"a radical change to the protocol that makes previously invalid blocks/transactions valid (or vice-versa), and as such requires all nodes or users to upgrade to the latest version of the protocol software. Put differently, a hard fork is a permanent divergence from the previous version of the blockchain, and nodes running previous versions will no longer be accepted by the newest version".
As of present date, I have only heard about 6 Bitcoin forks. Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin Gold, Bitcoin Diamond ,United Bitcoin, BitcoinX,and Super Bitcoin. All are an attempt on improving the original Bitcoin block chain. Some are focusing on efficiency. Others want to improve scalability. Which one is best? Will the the new coins be embraced? With well over a thousand coins in the crytpocurrency market, which ones will prevail? Please voice your opinion in the comments
That Changed Quick
While trying to add the market price of BitCoin forks to this post, I found all these forks on worldcoinindex.com:
Looks like more research is in order.
BTW. This is my first post. I hope it was somewhat helpful.
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