The Forking Paradise, Gold & Silver Report

A month ago, we wrote about the bitcoin fork. We described the fork:

Picture a bank, the old-fashioned kind. Call it Acme (sorry, we watched too much Coyote and Road Runner growing up). A group of disgruntled employees leave. They take a copy of the book of accounts. They set up a new bank across the street, Wile E Bank. To win customers, they say if you had an account at Acme Bank, you now have an account at Wile, with the same balance!

This fork came about from a disagreement among the bitcoin miners, those who control the blockchain and hence the currency. The equivalent of the disgruntled Acme Bank group left to form bitcoin cash, the equivalent of Wile E. Bank. However, it has often been said that necessity is the mother of invention. Applied to bitcoin, that means that what happened due to irreconcilable differences in this case, could also occur deliberately later.

Why would someone do this deliberately? Well, as of this writing (Saturday afternoon), bitcoin cash is trading for $568.28. This copy of the original bank ledger is worth over fahv hunnert Benjahminns! Actually, not the ledger. Each record in the ledger. The ledger as a whole is worth $9.4 billion.

For anyone—or a cartel of someones—who can fork bitcoin, there are now 9.4 billion reasons to do so. Think about that. Take as long as you need.

Now, we don’t want to disparage anyone. We are absolutely certain that everyone who is speculating to get rich in bitcoin will turn away from forking. It just doesn’t feel right, and it couldn’t possibly be moral to create forks on purpose, to get richer quicker.

But if someone did wish to do it, there is a powerful incentive. Economics tells us that if a powerful incentive exists to do something, then someone will do it. For example, if the government subsidizes borrowers by pushing down the interest rate then there will be all sorts of borrowing that would otherwise not occur (to finance all sorts of activities that would otherwise make no sense). Or, if it subsidizes insurance for people who build in flood plains, then many people will build in flood plains.

We now live in a world where altcoins are proliferating. There is a crypto currency named for a set of Internet memes called Doge. There is PotCoin for the marijuana industry, and even PepeCash and PutinCoin. There is a coin named for the most popular four-letter word. By this standard, it makes sense to fork bitcoin as many times as one can. To fork and fork and fork until the marginal ForkCoin has value lower than the cost of forking.