The Bet on a Bitcoin Hard Fork: $1 Million

The creator of Litecoin Charlie Lee, dubbed @satoshilite on Twitter, bet against Roger Ver, known as "Bitcoin Jesus". Charlie Lee is known for a disapproval of the SegWit2X consensus, although most Bitcoin miners are signaling they would support that version of the code.

And Roger Ver is known for supportingBitcoin Cashand larger block size in general.

“Let’s Raise the Bitcoin Block Size!”

The above sums up the position of Roger Ver.

Charlie Lee, however, supports SegWit as the better scaling solution for faster transactions.

And so, the bets were on on Twitter:

The above semi-friendly flame war suggests that Charlie Lee would rather own Bitcoin Core-based BTC coins than the new SegWit2X coins. The problem is, both chains can present really good arguments for being "the real Bitcoin".

And about six weeks ahead of a potential hard fork, no one knows what this debacle will mean for Bitcoin. The blockchain word is still new, and some solutions are discovered in stride.

But what about the $1 million bet? If there is a hard fork, Charlie Lee would potentially own 250 BTC on both blockchains. He will swap those new BTC for Bitcoin Core BTC. And then, the bet will be on which chain survives, and gathers more miners, holders and investors.

In fact, much more than $1 million is at stake when it comes to owning"the real Bitcoin".And currently, the battle is on between developers, mining equipment producers, and end users. Some of the demands cannot be easily reconciled- miners want easy mining and high rewards, users want transaction speed and investors want their assets recognized and traded on exchanges. Meanwhile, developers and providers of infrastructure have to react quickly to all the changes.

So far, Bitcoin has survived the ascent of altcoins- but will it survive a copy of itself?