Should we fork bitcoin?
Posted: Thu May 04, 2017 12:05 pm
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?
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?
