I really don’t understand the point of this article. It’s quite rudimentary without much insight or new analysis.
For someone who already owns cryptocurrency A, isn't there a perverse incentive to fork it into A', A'', A''', etc., because doing so multiplies the person's wealth.
I'd expect that a fork will exist if: a) it has a nontrivial chance of survival, and b) if there is an exchange mechanism for cashing out.
Another way of looking at it, what scenario creates an incentive for a fork to die once it has been created? There's no such thing as free money.
On the other hand, forking is a way of bootstrapping a new cryptocurrency variant without becoming a billionaire like Satoshi and needing to worry about would-be adopters questioning your motives.
The "exploit" of forking to generate a wealth multiplier generates a lot of wealth, just not Satoshi level wealth.
In a sense, forking is a signal of too much centralization, as those benefitting from that centralization fork to cash out on their accumulated influence.
With such a large percentage of cryptocurrency economic activity being speculation, the incentive to fork is ripe. On the other hand, if Satoshi wanted to sell of all his Bitcoin Cash and sink it, he could easily do so to protect his original creation, so perhaps we learn more about Satoshi's stewardship intent by watching what he doesn't do rather than what he does.
Bitcoin is such a UX nightmare. I finally got my funds transferred to a MultiBitHD wallet, after a lot of effort. I had to pay some service $20 to accelerate my transaction because my other fee of $20 was taking weeks to go through? Now I'm trying to claim my Bitcoin Cash. How do I do this? According to the internet, I need to transfer it to a different kind of wallet first? There's a bunch to pick from, but make sure it's not a scammy wallet. Also I need to extract my private keys with some command line stuff (MultiBit doesn't use normal keys) and run some weird programs to convert them? Then I need to move the funds around again to get it working in a new kind of wallet. Also make sure to do all of this on a clean computer in case these unvetted programs are stealing your keys. Don't forget to pay an extra $40 if you want the transactions to not get stuck forever. Oh and I have to do a bunch of other steps again if I want to get Bitcoin Gold or whatever new fork is going on.
I could eventually figure it out with enough time, but how any of this is supposed to be adopted by laymen baffles me. You'd think something with this much developer support would just let you click one button and have it all done.
What about the argument that the only chain that deserves to be called Bitcoin is the one that is completely backwards compatible to all the versions of software dating back to the genesis block?
I'm happy to answer any follow-up questions.
Hack Days talks a lot about this and how Bitcoin mirrors Linux in a lot of ways @ the 59 minute mark:
https://www.facebook.com/hackdays4all/videos/545598169119184...
Oh my, if it is valid to compare crypto forks to biological evolution, then I'm left to wonder how awesome humans would have been today if all the great forks didnt get killed off by lousy first-network effects.
I was a little confused by the abrupt inclusion of a quote from Nassim Taleb. Is he so well known in this space he can referenced without introduction?
This is a great read!
I don't have anything against bitcoin and cryptocurrencies in general, but I wish the cryptocurrency community would stop trying to co-opt the term "crypto".
It's a well-established (understatement of the century) shorthand for the term "cryptography", that no honest cryptocurrency enthusiast can claim in good faith to be ignorant of, because cryptography provides the technological foundations on which all cryptocurrencies are built.
Conflating these terms can cause undue confusion that breeds disdain for the very technology you're trying to promote. I, for one, was expecting to read an article on the history of cryptography as it evolved over the years when I clicked the link.
Despite all this, I just wanted to say the article itself was an interesting read, but you're doing yourself and the cryptocurrency community a disservice by unwittingly pulling a bait and switch like this on so many potential readers.
At the very least, please avoid using it as a shorthand in contexts intended for communication to those outside your community.
I'd suggest changing the title as I thought this was related to Cryptography. Cryptocurrencies is more appropriate than just crypto.
(Note that there are a bunch of cryptographers and cryptographer wannabes (like me) on HN who are not just (or not at all) into cryptocurrencies).
Crypto currency evolution, dammit!
The linked article from Nassim Taleb is fascinating. He's discussing Lebanon vs Syria, but he could just as easily be talking about bitcoin vs the traditional financial system:
"Simply put, fragility is aversion to disorder. Things that are fragile do not like variability, volatility, stress, chaos, and random events, which cause them to either gain little or suffer. A teacup, for example, will not benefit from any form of shock. It wants peace and predictability, something that is not possible in the long run, which is why time is an enemy to the fragile. What’s more, things that are fragile respond to shock in a nonlinear fashion. With humans, for example, the harm from a ten-foot fall in no way equals ten times as much harm as from a one-foot fall. In political and economic terms, a $30 drop in the price of a barrel of oil is much more than twice as harmful to Saudi Arabia as a $15 drop.
"For countries, fragility has five principal sources: a centralized governing system, an undiversified economy, excessive debt and leverage, a lack of political variability, and no history of surviving past shocks. Applying these criteria, the world map looks a lot different. Disorderly regimes come out as safer bets than commonly thought—and seemingly placid states turn out to be ticking time bombs.