Andreas Antonopoulos: Bitcoin hard fork is a matter of time

Bitcoin expert Andreas Antonopoulos recently shared his views on Bitcoin expansion and hard fork issues in the Chinese Bitcoin community 8btc AMA.

The expansion problem is likely to affect the long-term development of Bitcoin's value and even shake investors' confidence in Bitcoin. In response to this issue, Andreas Antonopoulos gave the following response.

Bitcoin is developing rapidly. There will be new features, improvements, and technological innovations accompanying the development of Bitcoin. Scaling is not the only factor that determines its fate. As long as Bitcoin is developing, the scaling problem will always exist.

Like Ethereum?

Antonopoulos said that Bitcoin has had two unintentional hard forks. There is also a hard fork in front of us, which is likely to split Bitcoin into two coins. Therefore, Bitcoin's hard fork experience will be similar to Ethereum's.

I think Bitcoin will hard fork sooner or later. After the Bitcoin hard fork is completed, two chains and two coins will be generated. There must be people who oppose the new chain and continue to use the old chain. Many big Bitcoin users do not agree to the fork, and they can definitely afford the mining costs of the old chain. Ethereum has already proved this.

Antonopoulos emphasized that the two chains born after the Bitcoin hard fork are larger in scale, because the value of the "old chain" alone is equivalent to the entire Ethereum ($1 billion).

A hard fork will not reduce the value of Bitcoin, but it will definitely cause confusion among users, wallet providers, and exchanges. Therefore, a hard fork plan should be carefully planned and the preliminary work should be done well. At the same time, we should learn lessons from the Ethereum hard fork, such as preventing replay attacks and helping users separate the two chains in their wallets.

Is the risk high?

More than a year ago, the dispute over block capacity expansion officially began, and hard fork has always been a more difficult issue.

Most Bitcoin Core developers are against hard forks because of the high risks. The Bitcoin Classic team said they can directly carry out a hard fork to increase the block size to 2MB. Some people are neutral and do not take this issue seriously.

Although Antonopoulos does not have the final say on the hard fork issue, his opinion still has a great influence. Moreover, China is the largest Bitcoin trading market. Recently, there have been rumors that Chinese miners are planning to hard fork Bitcoin on their own.

Antonopoulos once viewed the Ethereum hard fork as a lesson for the Bitcoin community. He believed that Ethereum's hard fork would be difficult to roll back because Ethereum does not use untransacted output (UTXO) liquidation.

At the same time, forks can also bring about DoS attacks, which can easily disrupt exchange services.

The Ethereum hard fork taught us that such untested behavior can bring high risks to exchanges and even the entire ecosystem, even for low-value currencies.

Expansion issues will always exist

Antonopoulos agrees with Core’s development path, which is to expand the main chain and develop some layer-2 protocols (Lightning Network). But he said that Core can only maintain its position if it meets market demand.

He believes that Core can still "call the shots" because they are in line with community values. The community believes that caution is better than directly achieving the highest expansion. Antonopoulos does not support unlimited increase in block capacity.

I don't know much about the details of the Hong Kong consensus, but I think Core is following the original plan step by step. If they really fail, the market will switch to another plan. But this is not the case at present, and the market still chooses to support Core. I think the implementation of Segregated Verification (Segwit) is the most important. I have studied Segregated Verification, and it will bring major changes to the development of Bitcoin.