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August 09, 2017 at 08:32 PM
Bitcoin implemented a hard fork on Aug. 1, and a new coin, Bitcoin Cash (BCH), was created over concerns that Bitcoin (BTC) was too slow. People with Bitcoin stored in their wallets at the time of the fork received an equivalent amount of Bitcoin Cash.
A hard fork is when a cryptocurrency’s underlying protocol is rewritten so that new blocks in the chain are fundamentally different from the old blocks, with new rules and even new valuations of the currency.
(Related: What’s Next for Crypto Coins as SEC Tames Wild West of Finance)
Trevor Koverko, CEO of Polymath, is unconcerned about the fork. “A blockchain fork is essentially a nonviolent, fair, market-based solution to the problem of having too many good ideas to implement at once,” he said in an email. “As weird as this sounds, a fork is a beautiful thing. A fork allows two factions within a project, with differing views and opinions, to both be right.”
Polymath is a technology firm that helps bring security tokens to market by automating the technical and legal functions for offerers.
Unlike the Ethereum fork last year, which was an attempt to save coins for users following a hack, the Bitcoin fork is “not fixing a previous mistake; we are trying to improve our precious protocol,” Koverko said of Bitcoin users. “And the way I see it, it’s working. We have two groups of really smart people who are getting what they want — their own sandbox to play in.”
Alexey Antonov, a financial advisor to SONM, a decentralized worldwide fog supercomputer, hesitates to call the division a fork in the first place.
“The event that occurred can hardly be called a ‘fork.’ While the Ethereum network fork was the result of economic issues, the Bitcoin fork is rather a political measure,” he said.
He explained that most miners on the Bitcoin network “raised no disputes about the future of the network and supported traditional Bitcoin politics” others insisted on the faster transactions that were expected as a result of the split.
