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by ohstopitu 3100 days ago
I have neither, Why can't he call his fork Bitcoin Cash? He claims that it adheres to the Bitcoin.org idea than BTC.

Him & a vocal community (/r/btc) appears to believe in that. What gives BTC (and /r/bitcoin) the right to the name Bitcoin considering both are forks from the original chain?

3 comments

Right now if you run an ancient bitcoin node it will still see the segwit addresses and the real Bitcoin chain as valid just fine. It cannot follow the BCash chain because it's not a valid chain to it. Also, the Bitcoin project has been marching along same as always, it seems disingenuous to claim that the original is a fork when it's the same exact project and it is still a valid chain for every Bitcoin node out there. I think it goes without saying that the original Bitcoin project should be considered the rightful owners of the trademark "Bitcoin" regardless of whether or not they legally own the trademark for it.
That is a point that can not be overstated.

You own your Bitcoins in the full meaning of the word. You fully control them, by way of your private key, but you also trust that the rules of Bitcoin won't change. The former ownership is technical but the latter is social.

There is an implicit social contract towards anyone who buys Bitcoin to be able to spend them any time in the future, under the same rules as today. That includes not having to upgrade to another ruleset with arbitrary changes.

For this reason it was important that the block size increase was made opt-in, and that any hard forking fundamental changes that are required in the future are trivial or have pretty much unanimous support.

Well, it should mostly see the real Bitcoin chain as valid until it doesn't. Older full nodes have a bug where they can't handle chain reorganisations properly with blocks that are the full 1MB in size, so the moment they see an orphaned block they break horribly. (Relatedly, if any big block pusher argues increasing the block size is just a simple matter of changing a few constants, that's a good sign they don't know what they're talking about.)
Ah, good point I remember something about that bug a number of years back. Point being SegWit is designed to be compatible with old versions of Bitcoin. Bugs aside it's still a valid chain, old Bitcoin nodes just break on blocks that are considered valid by their own rules.
One is the fork and the other is the original. By not taking the Bitcoin name the Bitcoin Cash group has already admitted that they are the fork. They should be proud about it and give themselves a new name that stands for their ideals.

That said I personally don't believe that the name will make a difference in this battle.

In terms of how chain splits work there is not a technical differentiation between a "fork" and the "original". In the case of the hard fork on block 478559 there was a pretty significant change to the consensus rules (EDA, 8MB blocks & no segwit).

What happened on block 494782 was also a fork in some respects, there was well telegraphed plans to change the consensus rules on that block, but no one mined/accepted blocks with those rules.

You can create a fork today but should you be allowed to take the bitcoin name? Leave the name with the existing entity.
The point is that Bitcoin Core is as much of a fork as Bitcoin Cash.

You're mixing up soft fork with a hard fork and implying that soft fork is somewhat better, when in reality it is just technical concept and has nothing to do with it.

Actually in current situation we already have example, the soft fork (SegWit) implements a complex mechanism to add segregation witness feature and allow for off-chain transactions.

The change in Bitcoin Cash is simply raising the block limit to 8MB. In fact initially bitcoin had no limit for the block size and the limit was added to prevent DDoS.

That limit was meant to be increased as there would be higher demand.

That is not true. Initially Bitcoin crashed when blocks went over a couple of hundred kilobyes. Satoshi put in this hard cap when this inadvertent limit was fixed.