Thoughts on surprisingly successful Bitcoin Cash fork of Bitcoin that allowed 2 strongly opposed communities to pursue their visions without hurting each other
Nobody could have summed up my thoughts on 2017 any better than Charles Dickens. It was the year where the totality of eventualities … Tweets: @e_barojas , @sirgrantfleming , @robmay , and @rsg Tweets: Everardo J Barojas M / @e_barojas : “A Tale of Two Bitcoins”—@VinnyLingham https://vinnylingham.com/...0- 657 ... pic.twitter.com/QDu3f7S9DZ Grant Fleming / @sirgrantfleming : A pretty detailed, non-technical, overview of the differences Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash by @VinnyLingham https://vinnylingham.com/... Rob May / @robmay : Wondering what this means for the fat vs thin protocol thesis https://vinnylingham.com/... Bobby Goodlatte / @rsg : I agree w/ @VinnyLingham on this principle, but I'd also ask small block advocates what they believe the upper bound of “within reach of individuals” is? It it really 1MB + Segwit? Years have passed since 1MB was set. Individuals' computers are much faster https://vinnylingham.com/...0- 333 ... pic.twitter.com/TRJBDafQRM
Context & Ripple Effects
Vinny Lingham's retrospective lands at the end of a three-year governance war inside Bitcoin. The fight began when Gavin Andresen and others launched the Bitcoin XT fork over the 1MB block capacity cliff, escalated through a Segwit2x proposal cancelled for lack of consensus, and ended — per Lingham — not with a winner but with an amicable divorce: Bitcoin Cash splitting off so both camps could build their own vision.
What makes the piece worth reading alongside the rest of the coverage is that its central claim got stress-tested almost immediately: within a year, Bitcoin Cash itself fractured in a contentious ABC-versus-SV fork marked by 51% attack threats, suggesting peaceful schism may be a repeatable mechanism rather than a one-off. Rob May's tweeted question about what this means for the fat-protocol thesis captures the open issue — whether value accrues to a protocol whose community and hashpower just split in two.
First-order effects
- Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash each gain independent roadmaps: neither community can veto the other's development direction, ending the block-size stalemate that had frozen both since the XT debates.
Second-order effects
- The successful split becomes a template for future disputes — Segwit2x organizers had cancelled rather than force a minority chain, and Lingham's framing legitimizes exit-over-compromise as the default move, a pattern visible when Bitcoin Cash's own community splintered into ABC and SV camps.
Third-order effects
- If schism-as-governance holds, crypto networks stop behaving like single jurisdictions with binding votes and start behaving like lineages that branch under pressure — raising unresolved questions, as May noted, about where protocol value settles when a chain's social consensus forks along with its ledger.
The trend: Cryptocurrency governance is shifting from forced consensus toward chain splits as the standard resolution for irreconcilable community visions.