Author: Cameron Garnham 2015-08-16 23:02:19
Published on: 2015-08-16T23:02:19+00:00
Bitcoin XT, a proposed fork of Bitcoin, is facing an uphill battle due to the possibility of atomic inter-fork coin trades. If Satoshi decides to sell 10,000 XTBTC for BTC every day for the first 100 days after the fork, it will be impossible for Bitcoin XT to win. Furthermore, Satoshi's economic investment in Bitcoin gives him the power to decide the winning fork. In game theory, there are several ways to disrupt non-consensus forks, including spoiling the ballot by having Bitcoin Core propagate the Bitcoin XT version string, encouraging miners to false vote for the Bitcoin XT fork, and setting up good Atomic Swap markets. In addition, a fork of Bitcoin XT that allows people to easily make a transaction only on the XT fork (while leaving the original BTC coins untouched) will make the Bitcoin XT fork premature with only a small percentage of hashing power behind it. The price for XTBTC coins will likely plummet, and Satoshi progressively dumping his 1M stash over a year or so will ensure that it doesn't recover either. These factors put Bitcoin XT in an extremely weak position from game theory. It is risky to play this game as any disagreement between the network and the biggest economic actors would mean BTC plummets.
Updated on: 2023-06-10T19:39:03.171803+00:00