Page 7 - March 2018 Disruption Report

CRYPTOCURRENCY FJEABNRUUAARRYY 22001188
Litecoin looks and in most other ways a lot like Bitcoin, but it has its own blockchain its own history. Ultimately, you would think that if Bitcoin is valuable [then] Litecoin should be valuable for the same reasons. You would also think that maybe Litecoin is unnecessary. ...It just sort of looks like Bitcoin divided by four, but it doesn’t trade for 25% of Bitcoin. It trades for a pretty signi cant value, but nowhere near 25% of a Bitcoin.
Litecoin is more democratic in the sense that the hardware that works on their blockchain is not the same hardware that works for Bitcoin and most of the other cryptos. In other words, you can’t just bring more horsepower into the race and get an edge against other people they’ve preserved an element of randomness due to the fact that they have this “s crypt” mining protocol that relies on a different part of your machine instead of the Bitcoin technology that just really relies on who has the fastest processor.
Galloway asked: Another big trend is “forking.” What forking is and why there is so much of it right now?
A fork is where a blockchain is adding blocks every 10 minutes say in Bitcoin and then basically it diverges. This can happen sometimes spontaneously, because two miners win at the same time and they both continue to mine in their own direction—those are resolved basically by a process of consensus, usually in a few minutes.
But some Forks are deliberate, where people will upload an alternative version of the software and invite people to opt out of the old code and to adopt theirs. So this is sort of like a group of the shareholders of a company saying we don’t agree with management, we have a different strategy and as many people who want follow us in this direction and then they’re able to maybe divide the stock and take some of the assets with them. This has happened now once with Ethereum and twice with Bitcoin. What it’s led to is competing versions, where they have a common history up to the point of the fork.
In the case of Ethereum, you have still something called Ethereum, but the original one called Ethereum Classic. It’s like a schism where they both claim to be the Pope.
In the case of Bitcoin, there was a fork called. Bitcoin cash that occurred last August. Bitcoin cash was meant to increase the block size— multiplied it by a factor of eight so that Bitcoin could accommodate the growing number of users who wanted to use it. Not long afterwards in October, something called Bitcoin Gold was a second fork that went in the other direction. It made it you know essentially reinforce some of the orthodoxy of the original Bitcoin. These are all catering to user communities who fundamentally
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