Should we fork bitcoin?

[Steve Sokolowski]

It was brought to my attention earlier today that there is a transaction available to earn over 273 bitcoins in fees for the first miner to fork the bitcoin blockchain. A description is available at https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/6 ... _with_273/.

Be warned that I have not verified that the transaction is correct and valid, so this entire post might be irrelevant. But if it is, we can enable SHA-256 mining, fork the bitcoin blockchain, and distribute the profit to all miners at the time the block is found. We are in personal contact with some exchange owners, and they would stand to make a huge profit by listing the "Unlimited" bitcoin. Getting the coin listed on at least one exchange would be easy.

The idea would be to announce the action as soon as the code is ready and before someone else takes the money, perhaps on Sunday evening, allow enough SHA-256 miners to come online to secure the new chain, get the coin listed on an exchange, and then execute the fork the following weekend. The 273 bitcoins would be worth almost nothing on the new chain at first, but perhaps they could become worth a fortune in the future. If not enough miners joined the pool to sustain what will be an orphaning war against the Core, then we simply would pay out the bitcoins mined during the preparation phase and shut down SHA-256 until we can add more coins.

There are many risks to doing this. It would mean that some of the current website bugs would need to remain broken, because time would be taken away from fixing them. We would have to close the site to new users after the number of miners approximately triples, because we do not have the manpower to expand any more so quickly. Finally, the new chain will have an enormous difficulty until the price appreciates enough for other pools to join in. Even if we could attain 1% of SHA-256 somehow, we might get two blocks per day at an opportunity cost to miners of $40,000. The transaction demand on the new coin with so few blocks might cause it to collapse. The timing also isn't very good. We would prefer to have more time to continue to fix bugs, so that alone might be a reason to throw out this longshot idea.

It's also possible that we might need more bitcoins in the reward, some of which we would take for ourselves. The extra bitcoins could be used to defend against criminals who are bound to try to steal money and attack our system. I could run the numbers to figure out how much that sort of stuff would cost if enough people showed interest.

Out of curiosity, does anyone have SHA-256 miners and would anyone be willing to participate in such a high-risk, high-reward action?

[jinxorbit]

Is this regarding the reddit post?

https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/6 ... h=c087b387

273 bitcoins at $1615 = 440,895... that's a nice block...
I am only running Scrypt, though...

[Elanaz]

Why to us SHA-256 miners? mining Scrypt is possible, and on the earned money to rent SHA-256 on nicehash. I think persons interested will be much.

[GregoryGHarding]

i vote yes

[piet]

yes! because,

some huge (chinese) btc miners are trying everything to make a fork happen.
making large amounts of minimal transactions so the fee will rise and payouts very slow....
Their paying about $1000 of fees everyday to f*ck btc with flooding payout/transactions and now there is "this".
They are screwing every user within the entire btc "eco system" just because of their own (BU) profits!

But like a reddit user says;
There's going to be a point where it is enough money though. The question is-- how much BTC is enough to make this happen? Is it 250 BTC? 1000 BTC? 10000 BTC?

So i will happen, Steves post/suggestion is also proof of it. (dont get me wrong!)
But is it worth a million or $1 ??

Lets play the Chinese game...
If there is a hard fork;
BTC and BU will be useless* / worthless in 2 years, i will sell my btc asap now i know this, what is a good coin to trade my btc into ?
i think scrypt / x11 will be huge, so blow up BTC, because of MY (scrypt) profits, not the Chinese!

Just my 0.00000200 cents and personal opinion!

* comparing eth to btc is like apples and bananas. Big compagnies are big money. Where are they investing in ? not btc but smart contracts etc...

[piet]

Is this regarding the reddit post?

I am only running Scrypt, though...

Me to, but i have no problem to "invest", like suggested; nicehash could be used for this, but we need a lot of PH users/power to accomplish this.

[Steve Sokolowski]

I thought about this a little more, and I'm thinking it isn't worth the effort right now. The problem is that while 273 bitcoins sounds like a lot, it's simply not enough money compared to the expenses miners would incur with the kind of hashrate we need for this. Plus, the 273 "bitcoins" would be on the new chain, which would be worth almost nothing at first. I think that we would need a million dollars, and that is in cash up front, to defend ourselves against the Core and to pay miners the hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost income to keep up this chain. We can't mine with a promise of income in the future when the bills would come due now.

Maybe after we get SHA-256 online and get more hashrate, we can look into this further.