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by MertsA 3101 days ago
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.
2 comments
xorcist 3101 days ago
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.

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makomk 3101 days ago
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.)
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MertsA 3101 days ago
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.
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