What is Bitcoin in the light of hard forks?
The power of the name
While at the start it might not seem like much, a definition of what “Bitcoin” is and which side of a fork gets to call itself that is really important. Bitcoin is a currency with over 125B USD market cap, a liquid market on numerous exchanges, and countless of projects using it, many of whom would barely be able to follow what’s going on in this debate. A fork of Bitcoin, on the other hand, has to start out with nothing and build up that market almost from scratch.
So what is Bitcoin, really?
“Bitcoin” is the ledger of not-previously-spent, validly signed transactions contained in the chain of blocks that begins with the genesis block (hash 000000000019d6689c085ae165831e934ff763ae46a2a6c172b3f1b60a8ce26f), follows the 21-million coin creation schedule, and has the most cumulative double-SHA256-proof-of-work.
It might, however, be worthwhile to start drilling down the definition and listing all of the important semantics that have or might be important in the future.
So Bitcoin could be defined as:
- A blockchain
- Beginning with the genesis block hash 000000000019d6689c085ae165831e934ff763ae46a2a6c172b3f1b60a8ce26f
- Containing only validly signed transactions
- Containing only not-previously-spent transactions
- Containing no more than ~21M coins
- Following the ~130 year coin distribution
- Continuously, publicly mined
- Double-SHA hashed
- With a difficulty adjustment every 2016 blocks
- Mined using a PoW algorithm
- Following the chain with the most cumulative work
- With a block limit of 1MB
- …
There are many such nitty-gritty details to list and rank. An important exercise for a lot of people is to rank these various features, and in case of a contentious fork – figure out which of those features might be changed.
Conclusions
Battling over which side of the fork is “the real Bitcoin” is more than just fighting over a name. It is the battle for market dominance, wide acceptance and legitimacy in the eyes of the laymen. The winner will be the world’s best know cryptocurrency, while the loser will be hardly talked about outside of the crypto circles.
Seeing which side of the debate will endure the upcoming forks will definitely be a seminal point in the story of Bitcoin.
