22 hr ago·u/Head_Work8441·r/CryptoMarkets·the_blake2b_fork_is_worth_understanding_as·B
Disclosure up front, I hold some XBT. Nothing here is advice and I am not telling anyone to buy anything.
The reason I pay attention to this chain has nothing to do with price. It is about what happens the next time Core ships something a large minority of the network does not want.
We already ran that experiment once. Core v30 raised the default datacarriersize for OP\_RETURN outputs from 83 bytes to 100,000 and started relaying multiple OP\_RETURN outputs per transaction by default. Be precise about this, because people constantly are not. That is relay and mempool policy, not a consensus rule. Nobody changed what a valid block is. Node operators can still set datacarriersize themselves, and Core backed off deprecating that option right before release. What actually happened is that the default flipped, and defaults are the thing almost everyone runs.
The response was not a coup, it was an exit. Knots went from around 3% of reachable nodes to north of 20%. That is the signal worth remembering. When a meaningful chunk of the network disagrees, it does not argue forever, it migrates to different software.
BIP-110 was the next step past that, changing proof of work to BLAKE2b. It did not get consensus, it was never going to, and the honest read is that it failed. Fewer than 10% of nodes, no top 20 pool. Then in August it forked anyway and became its own chain. Everything up to the fork height is Bitcoin’s own history, same balances at the same addresses, same 21 million cap, same halving schedule, same ten minute target, same retarget. What changed is the hash function.
That is why I think of it as a fallback rather than another BCH or BSV attempt. Those chains picked a fight about block size and wrote new rules going forward. This one makes no claim to be better money. It is the same ledger with different mining, which is the one property you would actually want from a backup if the thing you are worried about is capture of the dominant implementation.
And there is a real thing to be worried about. Peter Todd has been arguing for years that a fee only security budget may not hold, and he brought tail emissions back up at Bitcoin++ in July. He has not filed a BIP or a PR, and he admits it would take a hard fork he thinks might be worse than the problem. Adam Back has rejected it outright and compared the campaign to BIP-110. So this is a conversation, not a proposal. But it is a conversation among the people who write the software, about the one number that is supposed to be non negotiable. If a serious supply change ever gets traction, the chain that matters is whichever one carries the old rules and the old ledger without it.
Now the parts that people pushing this coin leave out, and you should hear them from someone who holds it.
It traded at $1,799 in September and gave back most of it. Market cap is single digit millions, daily volume is thin, and it is on a handful of small exchanges with no CoinGecko or CoinMarketCap listing. Exit liquidity is a real question, not a meme.
The hashrate is the bigger problem. BLAKE2b is what Siacoin ASICs were built for, so the hardware already exists and is cheap, which means it is also cheap to rent against the chain. Seventeen petahash is not security at Bitcoin’s scale. Reorg risk here is not theoretical.
The developers also pushed a soft fork locking newly mined coins for thousands of blocks after accusing pools of attacking the network. Whatever you think of the decision, a chain where developers can reach in and change spendability of mined coins mid flight is not yet the hardened thing people want it to be.
And the one that can actually cost you real bitcoin: because history is shared up to the fork, a key that controls coins on Bitcoin controls the matching coins here. Touching that chain with a key holding real BTC publishes activity tied to that address. The project’s own documentation says to use a fresh wallet kept only for XBT. Do not go sweeping your pre fork coins because someone online told you it was free money.
I am almost certain that this can become way way big by next halving, My estimation is atleast $10K, Don't take my word for it though. But It can happen for sure.
So Insurance with a real chance of going to zero, on a chain that would only matter in a scenario most people think will never arrive. That is the actual pitch. If that is not interesting to you, there is nothing here worth buying.
