Okay so this isn't the post I planned to write this week, but I got sidetracked by my own portfolio (such as it is) doing something weird over the weekend and I figured I'd write it up while it's fresh instead of sitting on notes for another topic.
I've been half-following the SegWit2x thing since October and last Wednesday it just... stopped. Mike Belshe, the guy from BitGo who'd been coordinating the whole effort, posted to the mailing list saying they were suspending the hard fork, and that was that. No coin split, no chain war, no need to figure out which wallet supports which ticker. A little anticlimactic honestly, after weeks of people telling me to move my (tiny, embarrassing) bitcoin holdings onto an exchange "just in case."
What's more interesting than the cancellation itself is what happened right after. Bitcoin jumped on the news, which makes sense, nobody likes uncertainty. But then over the weekend the money didn't stay put. Bitcoin Cash, the fork that already happened back in August, went nuts. Saturday night the price on it was climbing so fast that at one point Sunday it actually had a bigger total market cap than Ethereum. Ether had been sitting comfortably in the number two spot behind bitcoin for most of the year and for a few hours it just wasn't anymore. I kept refreshing CoinMarketCap like it was a sports score.
I don't think that lasted, by Monday things had mostly sorted themselves back out. But it's a strange thing to watch happen in real time, a second-tier coin briefly leapfrogging a much more established one because a bunch of traders decided it was the "real" beneficiary of a fork that got cancelled somewhere else entirely. None of it is rational in any normal sense. It's vibes and momentum and whatever thread everyone happened to read that hour.
I texted a friend who's way more into this stuff than I am to ask if it made any sense and he just sent back a shrugging emoji and something about "narrative trading." Which, fine, I guess that's an answer. Nobody actually explained why Bitcoin Cash specifically was the winner here other than it had the word bitcoin in the name and people wanted somewhere to put money that felt adjacent to the drama. That's not a technical argument, that's just branding.
Meanwhile bitcoin itself had a genuinely rough few days. It had been pushing up near $7,000 and then Sunday it fell off a cliff, down under $6,000 for a while before clawing most of it back by tonight. If you'd looked at your portfolio Sunday afternoon and not again until now, you'd think nothing happened. If you were watching the chart in between, you probably felt sick.
the part where I complain about graphics cards
Not really related, except it kind of is. I've been trying to replace my aging GTX 970 for two months now and every decent mid-range card is either sold out or priced like it's made of gold. Micro Center had a handful of RX 580s in stock last week and they were gone in a day, and I'm fairly sure it wasn't gamers buying them. Every price swing in crypto seems to ripple straight into the GPU market within about 48 hours, which is a genuinely annoying thing to live through when all you want is to play something at 1440p without your fans sounding like a jet engine. I'm not blaming miners exactly, people can do what they want with their own money, but it does mean I'm stuck on a three year old card a while longer, and I'm salty about it.
Anyway. The fork that didn't happen turned out to be more interesting than most forks that do, if only because of the four days of chaos it left in its wake. I don't have any grand theory about where any of these coins are headed by the end of the year. Everyone who tells you they do is guessing, same as me. I just found it a genuinely strange thing to watch unfold on a weekend when I was supposed to be doing yard work instead of checking my phone every twenty minutes.