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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   3549 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 2, 2024

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Around 2015/16 Bitcoin forked into Bitcoin (BTC) and Bitcoin Cash (BCH) as a result of different views over how large the blocks in the blockchain should be.

They did this by creating a fork in the blockchain where, after the date of the fork, all the transactions on one chain would be incompatible on the other chain. So if you bought BCH you could transact on the BCH chain, but not on the BTC chain, and vice versa.

However the blockchain prior to the fork is the exact same ledger for both BTC and BCH. So if you had a balance of 1 "coin" on the BTC ledger before the fork then after the fork you'll have a balance of 1 coin on the BTC ledger and a balance of 1 coin on the BCH ledger too, because it references the same transaction history. I hope that makes sense.

The upshot is that if you have a BTC balance from prior to the fork you have the same balance on all the chains that have forked from that same ledger.

Last time I looked, which was quite a while ago, BCH was worth about 1/10 of BTC, but BTC had gone up at least 10x so it's worth following up. You'd need to read up on the proper procedure to do it though because if you send your pre-fork BTC to someone without splitting the BCH out first you're essentially sending them both. I'm about at the limit of my hazy, hungover, half-remembered knowledge at this point.

There were a bunch of other chain splits, from the seemingly more serious minded ones like Bitcoin Satoshi's Vision (BSV) through to the more scammy looking ones that seemed to be just riding the brand name through the crypto hype wave, like Bitcoin Diamond (current value 7 cents). I think BSV forked from BCH, so the same principle applies there.

TLDR It's complicated and you should do some thorough research on before moving your coins. Many of the forked chains are practically worthless but a few of them, while worth less than BTC, are still worth a good bit of money on account of how much the whole market has risen since the date of the fork.

Here's an old article about one of the forks that explains it better and might offer some terms to search https://bitcoinmagazine.com/technical/beginners-guide-surviving-coin-split. Looks like searching "Bitcoin split" tends to return results about Bitcoin's regular mining reward halving which is totally different. Hope that helps you get started, my information is hugely incomplete and possibly wildly out of date!

Thanks for the reply.

BCH isn't worth much now. $461 for each. Probably worth bothering with for me, but the other forks seem to be worth much less.

Wikipedia: The following is a list of notable hard forks splitting bitcoin by date and/or block:

Bitcoin Cash: Forked at block 478558, 1 August 2017, for each bitcoin (BTC), an owner got 1 Bitcoin Cash (BCH)
    Bitcoin SV: Forked at block 556766, 15 November 2018, for each Bitcoin Cash (BCH), an owner got 1 Bitcoin SV (BSV).
    eCash: Forked at block 661648, 15 November 2020, for each Bitcoin Cash (BCH), an owner got 1,000,000 eCash (XEC).
Bitcoin Gold: Forked at block 491407, 24 October 2017, for each bitcoin (BTC), an owner got 1 Bitcoin Gold (BTG)*

For me, eCash, Bitcoin SV and Bitcoin Gold are probably not worth bothering with, unless it's easy. And I don't know if I got any Bitcoin SV or eCash, considering I didn't "claim" my Bitcoin Cash or whatever beforehand; not sure how that works. My Bitcoin Cash, I'd probably want to bother with getting, unless I have to risk my BTC balance in the process.

Not sure how I'm gonna do all this though. I don't even have a seed/recovery phrase. Just a multibit wallet.

The above isn't really right. If you owned Bitcoin before the Cash split, then you own the Cash as well, no actions post-split on the regular Bitcoin blockchain can affect it at all. To access it, you need to get a Bitcoin Cash wallet. You should be able to get a Cash variant of whichever Bitcoin app you are using and initialize it with the same key info that app is using.

If you're not into Cryptocurrency speculation, the simplest thing to do with it is send the Cash to an exchange that supports it, exchange it for regular Bitcoin, and send that Bitcoin back to your local wallet. Or set up a new Bitcoin wallet with the latest stuff, send your regular Bitcoin from the old wallet to that, as well as the Bitcoin you exchanged the Cash for.

I'm not a lawyer anywhere and have no idea what country you're in, so I have no idea what the legal or tax implications of doing this are. In a public forum and in the absence of any more detailed information, I can only suggest that you consult with a local lawyer and follow the law.

Yeah, thanks. I was able to claim my bch through importing the key into Electron Cash (after transferring the btc out to a more secure new wallet first).

Mind if I PM you?

Mind if I PM you?

Sure, no problem

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