Fork off: the dangers of forking the Bitcoin blockchain

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If the past is indeed a prologue, BSV users upset by Dr. Craig Wright’s pending lawsuits need to think long and hard before plunging the channel into the great unknown.

Bitcoin expert Joshua Henslee (@cryptoAcorns) has a new YouTube video titled On Forking Bitcoin in which he addresses a number of issues currently animating discussions in the BSV ecosystem. These issues include some dissatisfaction with Dr Wright’s efforts to use the courts to facilitate the return of the more than 111,000 Bitcoin tokens that were stolen following a hack into his computer in February 2020.

Wright seeks to compel the developers of the BTC, BCH, BCH ABC and BSV blockchains to recognize their fiduciary responsibility in helping to return stolen assets to their rightful owners. This has caused consternation in some crypto corners, as it goes against the belief that Bitcoin transactions are truly immutable and therefore immune to decrees from courts, governments or any other central authority.

The Henslees video opens with the question of whether the court system is currently capable of handling issues involving the ownership of digital assets. Within the Bitcoin community itself, there is a heated debate over whether owning a private key directly equates to owning a digital asset, a question that becomes even more thorny given the huge gap in the judicial understanding of the digital currency industry.

Henslee expresses unease over the potential consequences of allowing a court to order minors to redirect certain UTXOs to an individual who has demonstrated ownership of the stolen assets. Once the cats are out of the digital bag, what will stop governments from grabbing the assets of critics of their policies or actions?

Yet Henslee acknowledges that without legal recourse for victims of theft or fraud, the chances are slim that Bitcoin will one day emerge from its current digital ghetto and achieve its deserved status as a true global currency. There is no Solomon Islands solution that can be praised by all parties with a stake (direct or indirect) in the outcome.

Homicide: not a murder, but still a crime

Since the day Wright launched his legal action to recover his stolen coins, his motives have been assaulted by some voice factions of CryptoVille, including many BTC / BCH developers who are urged to facilitate the return of Wrights assets. Ironically, it is the actions these same developers have taken over the years that can lead to a token recovery scenario that the courts and the general public will recognize as legitimate. Block leader Jack Dorsey recently created a legal fund for centralized protocol developers who have a fiduciary responsibility to network users.

Wright’s recent legal victory over Ira Kleiman has reignited the discussion about the Bitcoins nLockTime feature and how it can be combined with smart contract scripts to secure Bitcoin in an automated trust, like the Tulip Trust that Wright is said to have secured. the vast stores of Bitcoin that Satoshi mined in the early days of Bitcoins. Such an arrangement allows the token holder to intentionally discard the private keys to further secure the assets against unauthorized access.

Henslee notes that many of the centralized protocol developers who are currently resisting Wright’s request for help recovering his stolen coins were among those who changed Bitcoin’s original protocol after Satoshi Nakamotos’ absence after 2011 in the limelight. Some of these changes invalidated nLockTime, rendering any rooms that were in this suspended animation state unusable.

With BSV having restored the Bitcoin protocol to its original state, the nLockTime functionality remains intact. Assuming Wright was able to regain control of these coins, Wright’s ability to spend BSV coins and demonstrate that hashes and UTXOs are the same on other chains would give his ownership claims a boost.

Henslee says Wright will have a strong argument to make in court that the code changes made by BTC / BCH developers have effectively seized property belonging to others. Henslee said it doesn’t matter whether this hijacking was done accidentally, which is why the legal system recognizes manslaughter as distinct from murder, because ultimately actions have consequences, requiring further action to be taken. repair the damage caused.

Bitcoin Spork Vision

Regardless of the correctness of his case, many of Wright’s legal cases have frustrated some members of the BSV community. These people see Wright’s continued presence in the courts as a distraction from the emphasis that should be placed on BSV’s technical prowess, resulting in a loss of liquidity that has discouraged more developers from making the channel look proper. .

Some of those restless BSVers are now publicly considering jumping into a new Craig-less channel that would retain all of the best BSV tunes while hopefully purging themselves of negative PR and legal baggage.

Henslee says he sympathizes with some of these groups, although he notes that the coordinated avoidance of BSV by exchanges such as Binance and Coinbase is largely responsible for liquidity, but he suggests these people may want to. think twice before making a decision that they can’t override.

As Henslee notes, the fork requires a significant amount of hash power to function. When BSV left BCH, Calvin Ayre was able to use his significant resources to support the fledgling chain. Who will support a new BSV fork to the extent necessary to ensure that malicious actors cannot treat the chain as their personal reorganization room?

Henslee also cautions fork fans to recognize that the experience of previous forks does not bode well for increasing the number of developers working on the technology. Forks divide communities, forcing developers to choose sides. Time is wasted tweaking products to conform to a new reality, time that would be better spent on innovation. Many apps do not survive these distractions.

In short, according to Henslees, the net negatives of a range far outweigh the potential positives, especially given the additional changes the software tends to undergo along the way.

Henslee claims that there is no current version of Bitcoin that reflects what Satoshi created that includes BSV (which still retains the difficulty adjustment algorithm and ForkID changes that were introduced in BCH at the time). Henslee argues that this is the result of the assured insistence by all developers that Satoshi was wrong and that significant changes to the original Bitcoin code are needed to correct these wrongs.

Henslee claims that all other digital currencies introduced after the arrival of Bitcoins are based on the assumption that Satoshi built something that couldn’t evolve. BSV, which most closely resembles the original Bitcoin protocol, refuted this assumption. As such, Henslee cautions that potential forkers should watch carefully before jumping, lest they find out too late that their new development team thinks the S in New BSV should stand for SegWit.

New to Bitcoin? Check out the Bitcoin for Beginners section of CoinGeek, the ultimate resource guide to learn more about Bitcoin initially envisioned by Satoshi Nakamoto and the blockchain.

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