Greetings Bitcoiners! We've got a coffee meetup happening at Denim in Mechanicsburg this Saturday, May 9th, at 8am. Their bitcoin POS works like a charm...come buy a coffee with sats and spend some high-quality time with fellow bitcoiners! Also this month, we're having a Pizza Day celebration on Pizza Day itself! That'll be 6pm on Friday, May 22nd, at Ever Grain on Carlisle Pike. Hope you can join us for one or both.  2026 has been a year that has seen the most interest in Bitcoin forks since probably 2017. That year was a tumultuous one, and saw the splintering off of bitcoin cash, AKA bcash, as well as some lesser-known forks such as bitcoin gold and bitcoin diamond. What does it mean when Bitcoin forks? What are the consequences for holders? If a fork is anticipated, what moves should the resourceful and cautious bitcoiner make, or not make? Bitcoin users coordinate with each other on the Bitcoin network thanks to the complex concept of consensus. Everyone that runs a node is running software on a network that is based around a set of rules. Some of these rules: no more than 21 million coins, no one can spend bitcoin they don't have, miners can't pay themselves more than the current block subsidy (3.125 BTC) + fees, and blocks can't be over a certain size. If you try to act in a way that breaks one of these rules, your transaction will be rejected by the network, and if you keep acting up, nodes you're connected to will put you in time out and won't talk to you for a while. What if there is a minority of the ecosystem, which may possess influence, power, and even amassed bitcoin itself, that has objections to the rule set, and wants to change something? In 2017, there was a vocal subset of the bitcoin community who really wanted something that was against consensus...they wanted bigger blocks, which would enable a higher throughput for the network. (I'm glossing over the block size war here, and leaving out a lot of the history...if you want a deep dive into the players and the very consequential series of events that was the block size wars, check out The Blocksize War by Jonathan Bier). Although there were a significant amount of powerful and loud proponents of this change, they failed to sway the community at large and forked off on Aug 1, 2017, at block #478,558. If someone owned 1 bitcoin on July 31st, 2017, after that block on Aug 1st, they now owned 1 bitcoin and 1 bcash token. There was no decision or action that had to be made by the hodler, they were simply bequeathed a bitcoin cash token, whether or not they had an opinion on the matter, or even knew the fork occurred at all. This leaves the hodler with a few options: (1) don't do anything...hold your bitcoin and bcash in it's 1:1 ratio, (2) trade your bcash in for bitcoin, effectively getting a bitcoin dividend, (3) trade your bitcoin in for bcash, or (4) some partial measure, like unloading half of the bcash now and holding on to the remainder. People holding their own coins and unaware of the fork, through their inaction, chose #1.  In the days/weeks after that hard fork in Aug 2017, the bcash price hovered around 0.1 BTC. Therefore, if you had offloaded your bcash as quickly as possible, you'd have netted a bitcoin dividend to the tune of 10%. There was a pump in the months after that, as Coinbase ninja-launched bcash trading, and the bcash price at one point wicked up to 0.5 BTC in Nov 2017. Since then, the price has been following the usual shitcoin trajectory...slowly down and down, making a pop here and there, and finding new lows every year. If someone held onto that bcash and wanted to sell now, how much would they get? 0.006 BTC, which is about 1/17 what you would have received if you dumped it right after the fork. There's a site that was launched in 2017, that amazingly still exists nine years later, called fork.lol. It includes pricing data between the two coins, as well as relative mining stats. Unfortunately, some people lost real bitcoin in the wake of the bcash hard fork, due to certain opportunistic scammers. There were fake versions of bcash wallets (i.e. a version of Electrum) that were released & promoted. If someone punched their seed phrase into this software, it'd send it to the scammer, and both their bitcoin and their bcash now belonged to them. Always go slow with a process like this, and ask for advice from other bitcoiners that you trust. Remember, inaction results in continuing to hold the same amount of bitcoin you already had, plus an equal amount of the fork coin. Before any attempt is made to claim fork coins, your bitcoin stack should first be moved to a secure new wallet. This way, if the process of recovering the fork coins goes sideways, your bitcoin is safe.  Back to the 2017 bcash fork. So if you held your own coins, you could've offloaded your fork coins (bcash in that circumstance). How you would have done this would depend on which type of wallet software you were using at the time. The lead hardware wallets at the time, Trezor and Ledger, made the process pretty simple in their user interfaces. What if you didn't hold your own coins? What if your coins were being entrusted to a third party at the time of the fork? That depended on the abilities and desires of the company. The company has a few options: (1) keep the value of the fork coin themselves, giving none of it to the users, (2) sell the fork coin on behalf of the users, and credit their accounts with bitcoin accordingly, (3) give them a fork coin balance that matches their bitcoin balance. All three actually happened in 2017. Many people were denied what could have been a 10% bitcoin dividend because they didn't hold the coins themselves. For those that had bitcoin IOU's from companies that went with the second option, that process was generally opaque, and it's unclear how much of a haircut users got during the process. By haircut, I mean, for example, the company could've received an average price of 0.11 BTC/bcash when selling it, yet reported a price of only 0.08 BTC/bcash, and pocketed the difference. There's many ways it can shake out for users, and almost all of them result in being short-changed relative to if they had held the coins themselves and sold the fork coins themselves. When that fork happened in 2017, it was clear which chain was Bitcoin, and which one forked off. In the future, that may not be so clear. There may come a time that the network forks again, both sides have the resources and narrative to keep their chain alive, and both claim to be the real Bitcoin. If you're holding your own keys, you decide what to do. The power is in your hands. If you like, you can vote with your wallet, selling the coins you don't believe in for the ones that you are philosophically and economically aligned with. If an exchange is holding your coins, this decision will be made for you.  There are talks of two different forks this year. The more well-known is related to BIP-110, and the second is being spearheaded by developer Paul Sztorc. A persistent fork takes a lot of work...anyone can spin up a client that follows any rules they like. It could say "we're going to fork at block X in the near future, and every transaction has to have a smiley emoji, and every transaction has to pay my address 1m sats or it's invalid." Creating the fork isn't the hard part...the hard part is having enough of an ecosystem to mine it, maintain its development, and most importantly, value the coins. I can easily create my own version of chess and say the board is 10x10 now instead of 8x8, and pawns can move like knights too if they want. It's hard to get people to play it with me though, and it's basically impossible to get everyone to call my new version "chess".  Consensus takes a long time to build, and breaking it can be very costly. Hope to see you at one of our May events! Keep stacking sats, and keep stacking skills. Bitcoin in the Burg 1. Provide value to others 2. Spend less than you earn 3. Save in a money that can't be printed by someone else for free