Here are the final two questions of my Q&A with Oscar Lafarga, CTO of SetOcean. If you haven’t read part 1 yet, click here.
Alan Percal: If people have their Bitcoin on an exchange like Coinbase or Gemini, do they need to move it prior to the fork date in order to get their new coin?
Oscar Lafarga: So if your Bitcoin is held on an exchange, you don’t actually own the coins within the wallet. You TRUST that the exchange will honor your balance, but you don’t have much say when it comes to forks. The tricky thing about forks is that they open up a vulnerability called a replay attack. Your original coins are not at risk at all. However, if you send a transaction on one chain, a malicious miner can “replay” that transaction on the other chain, so you’d lose the coins on the other chain that you did not intend to send. No matter what wallet you use, whether on or off-exchange, you need replay protection when transacting post-fork. This is why Coinbase still hasn’t released the BCC forked currency to their customers. They’re busy scaling users so, with limited resources, it would be unsafe to simply give users access without providing replay protection. Nonetheless, the “safest” thing to do after a fork is to hold both currencies if you don’t know which one will end up winning out.
Alan Percal: We’re running out of time, but quickly, how do you expect this fork to impact the value of Bitcoin?
Oscar Lafarga: I expected the Bitcoin Cash fork in August to put a lot more downward pressure on the BTC price. In theory, the sum of the two coins post fork (in USD) should somewhat follow the price of BTC pre-fork, but obviously, it’s impossible to know all the factors. For this Bitcoin Gold fork, the first red flag I read was the lead developer choosing to remain anonymous. I don’t expect much from Bitcoin Gold but I also don’t know too much about it. The Segwit2x fork is a lot more relevant to the community so I’ve been paying attention to that.
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This concludes my Q&A with Oscar. Stay tuned to PERC360 for a Segwit2x analysis from Oscar coming soon.
If you’re interested in reading more from the folks at SetOcean you can check out their Medium.
