Over the last couple of months the cryptocurrency Bitcoin have experienced something that's called a hardfork. Essentially a hardfork is an upgrade of the blockchain or the protocol of the blockchain, in this case the Bitcoin blockchain. Without going into further technical details which I feel I cannot answer correctly, what's more important is the incentives of doing a hard fork. Put it simply, what's the reason for developers to create a new kind of Bitcoin with a hardfork?
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Because one of the core incentives and aspects of a hardfork is that you will get new free tokens in a 1:1 ratio. For example if you held 10 Bitcoins at the time of the Bitcoin Cash hardfork you would get 10 Bitcoin Cash for free. Therefore I think it's naive to say that the developers behind a hardfork is only doing it in order to improve the blockchain protocol. There is an element of greed and profit hunting here. The technical argument for creating Bitcoin Cash was to increase the transaction speed by increasing the block size, which sounds like something necassary. But the price of Bitcoin Cash fell after the hard fork and didn't pick up until the announcements of another hardfork!!! How weird and crazy isn't that? A hardfork of a hardfork!!! This also proove the aspects of quick and easy profits that developers can make by doing another hardfork.
More so, during the last month or two the new hardfork Segwit2x has been heavily debated with the result of the fork being cancelled due to lack of support. If this is something new where developers is more careful of going through with a new hardfork remain to be seen.
The latest addition in this hardfork-mania is Bitcoin Gold which purpose is to make it easier to mine Bitcoin again. More so there is even rumors now of another Bitcoin hardfork coming up. Bitcoin Silver which purpose yet again is to make Bitcoin mining easier and more decentralized. Now since Bitcoin Gold already promises to solve that, is Bitcoin Silver really needed? As of today Bitcoin Gold has dropped significantly. But who knows maybe some developers could do another hardfork of Bitcoin Gold in order for the price to rise!!
For me it seems that all new currencies of the hardforks of Bitcoin don't increase in price beacuse of healthy adoption and more usage, but of another hardfork where the developers promises to revolutionize the cryptocurrency world by making Bitcoin great again with reference to Satoshi Nakamoto's original vision! This in itself is absurd because nobody knows who the guy is and therefore can't truly know what his or hers vision was or still is.
To conclude, during the last couple of months I think we've had to many hardforks, which the market has prooved. Afterall Segwit2x got cancelled and Bitcoin Gold hasn't got much adoption. The only hardfork I think that can qualify as a succesful hardfork is Bitcoin Cash beacuase it solves a major problem with the original Bitcoin, transaction speed. But Bitcoin Cash in itself has only got more adoption the latest time beacause of antoher hardfork on its own.
My final and most important thought and question is where the original Bitcoin stand in all of this and how will it be affected if more forks will be completed? As I have said I can see the necassity of hardforks in order to improve certain flaws in the original Bitcoin. But my main concern is that things can get out of control and damage the whole crypto universe if too many forks gets done. I mean is the next step a hardfork of a hardfork of a hardfork? Therefore I think it's vital for developers to really consider what they can contribute with technically to the crypto universe and really see if they got support for their hardforks before executing on it. Otherwise the damage on the reputation of Bitcoin is already done and therefore on the whole crypto universe, since Bitcoin is the main brand and marketer of it all.
So what do you think? Is all these hardforks necassary and what can the consequences be?
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