Bitcoin Is Having a Civil War as It Enters a Critical Month
I&#x27;m starting to see a bit clearer on how a fork would pan out:<p>Miners: Hashing power has little influence. As long as there are miners, and two chains rejecting each other transactions will be processed. At first, transactions processing might take a while, but difficulty will adapt. This will create two legitimate currencies. Now everybody in possession of 1 BTC would have 1 BTCa + 1 BTCb.<p>Exchanges: Little power. They will trade both BTCa and BTCb, and accept commissions.<p>Trader of goods, in embedded devices: They might have to modify their client to accept both currencies, but they would have to follow the market rates. Otherwise they would have to suffer income loss from people using them to profit from arbitrating the markets.<p>BTC-rich individuals: They have now 1 BTCa + 1 BTCb. But there is transaction replayability. If they spend 1 BTCa, their BTCb can also get spend the same way. And they lose their BTCb. Chains have a strategic advantage to replay transactions getting to the other one because: 1) they get to keep the commission, 2) they ascertain themselves as more encompassing economically (not sure on this one maybe, they want to stay neutral).<p>Now, if BTC-holders can wallet-emptying-double-spend them to 2 different addresses they control on the 2 chains. And, compared to the ones who got their transaction replayed, they have kept both their BTCa and BTCb.<p>TL;DR: IMHO, come the technical fork, some BTC-holders will be tumbling until they irrevocably acquire their BTCa + BTCb, and use them to make runs on the markets, effectively materializing the economic fork.<p>----<p>I&#x27;d love the opinion of someone who lived through the ETH-ETC split, especially about the transaction replayability part.