That's correct, so anything that isn't generally accepted doesn't have the same support or value. To date there have not been any legitimate forks that I'm aware of.
Whether you consider it legitimate or not, Bitcoin Cash has about 4% of the value of BTC.
Here’s my point. Is it theoretically possible for some group of people in the physical world to take actions so that what we generally call Bitcoin has 1 more coin? I strongly believe yes. So the world isn’t as black and white as some people like to say it is.
Just as the stock market can only have 1 AAPL ticker, there can only be 1 BTC. Is it possible that in the future that BTC can have a change in emission and cap? Yes. I don't agree with that part of the parents statement. But there is in no way for there to be more than 1 BTC chain.
There’s only one AAPL because we all agree there is. What if the NYSE and NASDAQ disagreed? It all comes down to people.
This is the bait-and-switch of crypto. People act like it’s all code and messy humans aren’t involved and this just isn’t true.
The original comment I replied to said there will only ever ever be 21,000,000 Bitcoin. I believe this is not fundamentally true because “Bitcoin” is whatever people say it is. If we all agreed to accept a fork with 22mil and call it Bitcoin, then that’s what it is. Sure, that old fork only has 21mil, but who cares? Old forks get dropped all the time.
This all isn’t entirely theoretical. This already happened with the other major part of cryptocurrencies, the immutable blockchain. What we all call ETH has a rollback in it!
No, this hasn’t happened with BTC but there’s no reason it can’t. Every second that the Bitcoin blockchain doesn’t get rolled back, every second that there are only 21 mil possible Bitcoin is because we all collectively agree that’s the case.
Stocks and cryptocurrency are not at all the same thing, I assume people think this way only because they can both be summarized as a number that moves up and down over time. Apple is a company located in the physical world that owns raw materials and a business process that transforms raw materials into value. It makes no sense to have another Apple ticker because the point of a stock is to track the value of that physical company. Cryptocurrency is totally different in the sense that it isn't a thing that exists in the physical world, instead it is a collective abstraction over a distributed database that the users agree to call "bitcoin". It is a purely political designation.
It’s an interesting argument that a cryptocurrency designation is more political than a corporation!
I argue that they’re about the same. A corporation is largely numbers in computers and how people feel about them. A cryptocurrency is numbers in computers and how people feel about therm.
Typing this out makes me appreciate gold a bit more. Gold is gold, whether we give it a different name or not. It’s not pure thought-stuff like a corporation. The problem is it only has whatever value we give it, so I’m certainly not arguing it has inherent value or is a better currency.
Stock market tickers are exchange dependent, especially across geographic boundaries, so to avoid confusion as to which stock is referred to, many finance sites include the exchange as a prefix to the ticker, i.e., NYSE:AAPL.
However, at least in the US, a company is not allowed to choose a stock ticker already in use by a company publicly traded on a US exchange.
The first part is consensus. The most supported one maintains the original name. The second part is support and use. Even though other forks have a cost, does not mean they are legitimate. I'm not sure if you've heard of Craig Wright, Calvin Ayre, and Roger Ver, but they are majority holders of these forks and control supply and therefore price. I will not go into a huge lengthy discussion about this here, if you Google this there are others that can provide more information and explain this much better than me.
Where exactly is any of this defined in the bitcoin protocol? The real bitcoin isn’t made by particular people that you don’t like? I thought all that mattered was the code and now we have unelected random people deciding which code is good for me to use and which is bad?
Right. That's my point. Even though ETH hard forked to undo transaction history, the fork is still considered "ETH" because that is what the leaders decided (and the community agreed to that decision). If Vitalik had made a different decision then the "ETC" chain would still be called "ETH" today.
whats missing here I think is the value of social consensus. None of these coins have any staying power without the social consensus that makes them the main chain. Its why there can't be clones with the same value popping up every day, there is clout that the dominant chains maintain
Sure but that doesn’t mean it isn’t “bitcoin”. Which bitcoin is the real bitcoin? Bitcoin Satoshi’s Vision? Bitcoin Cash? Bitcoin Classic? The fork I just made?