[cjhanks]

I don't either. Fiat currencies don't fork - you can simply exchange one for another. Another close comparison is a traded equity having a 2:1 split, except shareholders technically lose nothing. Another case would be stock dilution - though, I have never heard of a public stock diluting to 50% value... that seems unlikely. If a specific commodity were to suddenly decide it had an unreported surplus on the order of 100% of current market estimates, the consequences on valuation would be pretty significant (maybe not a 2x loss...).

I guess the closest comparison to bitcoin is; oil price is at $60 / barrel today and speculators believe there is a 30% chance that they mis-estimated the number of barrels by 100% - but you won't know for sure for another 3 months. What's should the price of oil be tomorrow?

[nikcub]

> Fiat currencies don't fork

There was an interesting situation after the fall of the Soviet Union. Because most of the states didn't have economies strong enough to support their own currency, they remained a unified currency union as part of the CIS

The only problem was that each state then started printing the money like mad and then sending it to other states to be sold / traded. Some of the states then introduced what was a quasi two-currency system - to buy local currency or to exchange it, you required both the old Soviet Ruble and a new "permission" note from the state to exchange.

In theory this placed a cap on the inflation but the result was almost like a currency fork. A lot of these states ended up establishing their own currencies but still had problems with "swaps" from the old currency - so they were constantly reissuing new notes and new coins that needed to be exchanged - but many of the old notes or permission slips would have value on the black market

[fernandopj]

> Fiat currencies don't fork

Another situation: in Brazil 90's, inflation was rampant and a new currency was being planned. But, until BRL was printed as the final currency, a few "forks"/new money were introduced, like URV (for one year), which set the market value for the new BRL, something like 2500:1 old-money:URV then 1:1 URV:BRL. So, the analogy: a fiat fork did happen and a two-currency system was put in play, until the "miners" decided to ultimately put the hash power into just one fork.

[cjhanks]

I forgot about that! Interesting point.

[netsharc]

A lot of European currencies changed to Euro in 2002. A "fork" would've been if e.g. Deutschmarks were still accepted as legal tender, indeed some nostalgia shops/events like a "90's party" would accept this currency, but not the general economy. And indeed Deutschmarks can still be traded to Euros, but at a fixed rate. If a Bitcoin fork had happened and neither currency crashed, you can still trade each other like Dollars to Euros, as long as you can find someone who wants to sell you Dollars (BTC) and be paid in Euros (BTH) or the other way around.

[baddox]

For the analogy to hold, wouldn’t each holder of a Deutschmark also need to be given a (portion of a) Euro? That wouldn’t be easy to do with physical currency, since there’s no easy way to mark each Deutschmark currency as having been awarded.

[jstanley]

That's not a close comparison at all.

When a cryptocurrency forks, you keep the same amount of coins on both sides but the 2 are wholly incompatible with one another.

A closer comparison is that you it's like 2 simultaneous futures, but with different consensus rules.

[cjhanks]

Oil futures exist and option prices are usually tied to speculation of quantity. If the price becomes wholly detached from scarcity; it's not a commodity or a currency, it's just means for speculative gambling.