Why I just bought 90 B2X (Bitcoin SegWit2X futures)

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My BT2 balance in BitFinex

I just spent about $85.000 on buying B2X futures. This just means that once SegWit2x goes live, I’ll already have 90 coins. But why did I spent nearly a $1000/coin for coins that everyone will get for “free”?

Simply because I think that the SegWit2x coin will become “Bitcoin” and the current Bitcoin will become Bitcoin Classic. Let me explain…

Currently 85% of the mining power of bitcoin is signaling they will support a block increase to 2MB around the 16th of November. Once this block is generated, bitcoin will fork into Bitcoin Segwit2X (B2X) and Bitcoin Classic (BTCC). At this point either of them could become Bitcoin “BTC”.

So you won’t really get “free” coins. More accurarely, your Bitcoins will be splitting in two… one BTCC and one B2X. One of these will be worth a lot, the other not so much. Together they will be worth around the same as one BTC before the fork, maybe a little more.

Let’s looks at what could happen to BTCC. If it really only gets 15% of the hashing power, blocks will take over an hour. Since the BTC blockchain is currently already congested, things will get almost 7 times worse, so transaction fees might go up a lot, just to get your transactions into the BTCC chain. This could lead to many people pulling out of BTCC, thereby lowering the price and that would cause a death spiral for BTCC. However, BTC has been proven to be quite resilient, so the price might stay as is and if the price stays high long enough, miners will shift mining power back to BTCC and B2X will crash into a death spiral instead.

Keep in mind that this fork is very different from Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin Gold and the myriad of newly announced forks coming up. Segwit2X was agreed upon back in May by:

58 companies located in 22 countries

83.28% of hashing power

5.1 billion USD monthly on chain transaction volume

20.5 million bitcoin wallets

And more have joined afterwards and some have left. This is still very different from the small amount of support that Bitcoin Cash and Gold had.

Another major difference is the lack of strong replay protection. While this sounds desirable, the reason why the SegWit2X team doesn’t want to implement this is clear from what Mike from BitGo had to say about it:

”Replay protection”, as you call it, splits the chain. It simply doesn’t

make sense- you’d suddenly be breaking 10+million SPV clients that

otherwise work just fine. It is a goal of segwit2x to help avoid this.

Today, we’re on course to deploy segwit2x with a vast majority of miners

still signaling for it. On top of that, 99.94% of nodes & SPV clients will

automatically follow that longest chain (segwit2x).

So in the end it will come down to which of the chains will receive the most support. With the huge support for B2X in the ecosystem, there is a good chance that B2X will be recognized as the “real” Bitcoin and take the price of BTC, around $6000… and BTCC will become an altcoin worth a few hundred dollars.

So if SegWit2X becomes the needed upgrade to Bitcoin it’s trying to be, I walk away with a cool half mil. If not I take maybe a $40k hit. I think my odds are pretty good here, but time will tell.

I’ve bought about 84 BT2 coins (that’s the name of the B2X future)at Bitfinex and 6 or so at HitBTC.

UPDATE 9-Nov: So today I woke up to the news of the fork being cancelled. BT2 trading at $200 and B2X trading at $320. Obviously not the outcome I was hoping for, but I always knew this was a gamble. I still think it was a good gamble for the odds and that it had positive expected value. I’d do it again.

The moral of the story is, don’t risk what you aren’t happy to lose.

(It looks like there’s a rumor 30% of miners are going ahead anyway… not holding my breath, but I’m holding my BT2)

UPDATE 13-Jul-2018: I sold my BT2 at a big loss. I made plenty on other trades and arbitrage. Cashed out most of my crypto holdings around Christmas last year. Trading was fun, but I got frustrated with the lack of quality/support in exchanges, so decided to use my profits to start a different kind of exchange. Recently I launched the XS2 Exchange.

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