Comment on BlackRock’s Bitcoin Scheme: How Wall Street Giants Are Bilking Poor People Out of Money
SinningStromgald@lemmy.world 3 weeks agoI’m going to entertain this out of curiosity. What do you mean “we can fork BlackRock’s Bitcoin away any time we want”? Do you mean starting a new coin? Because we have seen what happens there. The insiders get all the money and everyone else gets bent over.
xodoh74984@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I don’t think it’s realistic, but what they mean is that the community can in theory get together and decide to fork the code, collectively deciding that BlackRock’s Bitcoin addresses are no longer part of their Bitcoin network. The BlackRock Bitcoin would be incompatible with the forked code.
The result of a fork like that is two coins: BlackRock Bitcoin and Everyone Else Bitcoin. Each holder of the original Bitcoin gets an equal amount of both. It’s a popularity contest between the two resulting Bitcoins to determine the price of each.
In 2017, Bitcoin was struggling to scale. It had absurd transaction fees due to demand (just like Ethereum a few years later), and the community couldn’t come to a consensus on how to upgrade it. 10% of the community forked the code to upgrade it by increasing block size, while everyone else opted for an L2 scaling solution. The result for holders was that they ended up with both Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash in their wallets. Weirdly, the combined market value ended up being higher than value of the Bitcoin before the fork. I sold my Bitcoin Cash immediately and pocketed the money, expecting the price to go to zero. It did not.