All these Forks and nothing to eat

All these Forks and nothing to eat - yet!

It seems that October of 2017 will be the month of the Fork. After recently surviving the first Segwit fork a couple months ago, which led to Bitcoin Cash, we now face another "Fork" on October 25th which will create Bitcoin Gold.

I use the term "Fork" lightly there because it isn't really a fork, instead it is an air-drop. That is to say the BTC code isn't really forking like it did for Segwit, but instead on October 25th Bitcoin Gold will magically appear for anyone that holds any BTC.

Not much is known about Bitcoin Gold other than it's main purpose is to put more power in the hands of the small minors at the expense of the big mining farms. Bitcoin Gold will be able to be mined on simple home based PC hardware, whereas regular BTC requires custom build ASIC mining rigs.

There is also a big Ethereum (ETH) fork coming in a few days on about October 15th (on block 4,370,000). That is a true fork and will be the launch of the Byzantium upgrade to ETH. The Byzantium upgrades sound good and should be good for ETH. They are generally aimed at speeding up transactions, making the entire network "lighter" and adding security to smart contracts.

As always, there is a chance of a new forked version of ETH like what occurred in the past when ETC (Ethereum Classic) was created, but most big miners and exchanges seem to be on board with this fork and therefore a split is unlikely to occur.

Then we have the Segwit2 Fork in November. That is the continuation of the Segwit fork that started all the ruckus at the end of the summer over any BTC fork in the first place.

So what does all this mean to you as a Cryto-currency holder? Well it might explain why ETH has been stuck around $300 for quite a while. A lot of people are waiting to see the fork go off without a hitch before the price runs up.

Also, the Bitcoin Gold fork might explain the depressed price in Alt coins recently as a lot of people are selling Alts at any price in order to hold as much BTC as they can at the time of the air-drop. The more BTC you hold at that time the more BTC Gold you will get.

Here's a couple articles that I think do a good job of summing up the various forks and what to be looking out for:

Bitcoin Gold:
https://cointelegraph.com/news/will-bitcoin-gold-return-power-to-ordinary-users

Upcoming Forks and Alt coin future pricing:
https://www.cointelegraph.com/news/with-5000-bitcoin-price-in-sight-whats-to-come-for-altcoins

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