Forking Currency

August 5th, 2017
bitcoin, money
Lets say I start a new currency, the Credit, to compete with the Dollar. The traditional way to do this would be for me to offer to convert between Dollars and Credits, but let's say instead I give credits to existing Dollar owners. You show me a Dollar bill with a serial number I haven't seen before, I give you Credits.

I think this is a helpful analogy for thinking about the recent Bitcoin Cash fork. Anyone can make a Dollar fork, and for people who hold Dollars in their native form, paper, this isn't a problem: you can choose to participate in the fork or not, mostly based on whether the fork ends up being worth something. On the other hand, what if someone owes you a Dollar, perhaps because you loaned it to them, or you deposited it in their bank? In the Dollar case this is very clear: they have no obligation to interact with Credits at all, and if they happen to give you back bills that have already been registered for Credits that's your problem. If they registered all the bills they held and kept the Credits for themself, even that would probably be fine.

Why is people's sense of what's reasonable different in the cryptocurrency case?

Comment via: google plus, facebook

Recent posts on blogs I like:

On Polarization

weirdmaxxing as a dating strategy

via Thing of Things March 14, 2025

Frozen meals are actually great

I cook most of my meals and am pretty frugal. I do a lot of meal prep (cooking in bulk), so I don’t have to cook every day in order to have food. But sometimes I run out of my meal prep or just want something different, and don’t have energy to cook somet…

via Home March 7, 2025

Breakfast Over February Break

Over February break I made breakfast for me and Nora three days in a row. Normally, my dad makes me, Nora, and Lily breakfast, but my dad and Lily were on a trip and my mom wasn't up yet so I was basically the only one in the house who was awake and cou…

via Anna Wise's Blog Posts March 1, 2025

more     (via openring)