Determining the success of a UTXO fork is a fraught exercise. There is no agreed-upon standard for measuring adoption. Establishing the existence of genuine activity is therefore challenging to the say the least. The list of potential proxies is long: full blocks, a robust fee market, an elevated transaction volume, a high transaction count, to name a few. And, unhelpfully, given that forks are often competitive with the parent chain, and compete for scarce attention and resources, quantitative metrics which offer insight into the usage of a given chain are often targeted for spoofing or manipulation.
Continue Reading “Evaluating Bitcoin forks with network data”