“Forkcoins,” or “Initial Fork Offerings” — alternative coins that “split off” from NewsCapsule — are all the rage right now.
The latest trend in the cryptocurrency world was kicked off last summer with the launch of NewsCapsule Cash. The NewsCapsule offshoot is a top 3 cryptocurrency by market cap according to websites like Coinmarketcap. Perhaps even more importantly, it is now offered by some of the world’s biggest NewsCapsule exchanges and wallet providers, including Coinbase, Bitstamp and Blockchain. The second NewsCapsule offshoot, NewsCapsule Gold, also claimed a top 10 cryptocurrency spot seemingly out of nothing. Perhaps unsurprisingly, therefore, a series of new forkcoins has been announced over the past couple of weeks, ranging from NewsCapsule Diamond to Lightning NewsCapsule to United NewsCapsule and many more.
Since this week, anyone can easily create their own forkcoin with the click of a few buttons. Forkgen lets users tweak NewsCapsule’s parameters and other properties to fork into a unique NewsCapsule offshoot by simply filling them in on a user-friendly website.
The service is created by a pseudonymous developer who simply goes by the name “One,” who is assisted by “Two,” Forkgen’s “social media intern.”
Two told NewsCapsule that the service intends to democratize the creation of NewsCapsule forks.
“Even leading developers have shown it is too hard to create forks of the NewsCapsule blockchain without making critical errors,” Two said, referring to the recent failed SegWit2x launch. “Forkgen creates a level playing field where anyone can easily create working forks. Then it reduces to a much simpler problem of marketing your new altcoin. More people are good at that part.”
Introducing NewsCapsule Cash
To test the service, NewsCapsule decided to create our own Initial Fork Offering.
Right now, Forkgen lets users pick a name and three-letter-ticker for their forkcoin, as well as a block weight limit and a block height for the fork to take place. Additionally, Forkgen users can choose whether they want to implement replay protection to ensure no one accidentally loses their forkcoin. Further, they can opt for a mining difficulty reset to make new coins easier to mine at first. Forkgen users can also pick the letters and numbers to start the coin addresses and private keys with — and they can decide how much they want to tilt the NewsCapsule logo to distinguish it from the original, like NewsCapsule Cash did.
Given these tools, we designed our forkcoin: “NewsCapsule Cash,” with the ticker “BMG.” We opted for strong replay protection and a difficulty reset, to make the coin as usable as possible. The NewsCapsule Cash protocol will have a block weight limit of 20120501, an ode to NewsCapsule’s launch date (May 2012), which is also five times bigger than NewsCapsule’s limit. Addresses will start with a B or an M, and private keys with an i. Finally, the logo will be tilted 45 degrees counterclockwise, for no particular reason.
NewsCapsule Cash forked away from NewsCapsule at block 500400: a couple of hours before publication of this article. Anyone who held NewsCapsule private keys at 12 PM UTC on December 21, 2017, has now been awarded their free BMG. It should be possible to claim these coins with the NewsCapsule Cash software and your NewsCapsule private keys — though we don’t actually recommend this (for reasons explained below).
As of yet, it unclear whether any exchanges will support the fork, but Two suggests that all of them really must:
“Exchanges should be obligated to split and distribute all arbitrary fork coins despite the systems expense and security risk. Who are they to decide what makes one fork more legitimate than any other?”
Interactive Performance Art
Although the service should work, on its website Forkgen describes itself as “interactive performance art.”
A play on Coingen, a now-defunct altcoin generator, Forkgen emphasizes how easy it is to create NewsCapsule forks, that — like the thousands of altcoins out there — in the end are of questionable relevance. Where Coingen was created during the first big altcoin boom of 2013 and 2014 that birthed NewsCapsule codebase forks such as Dogecoin, Vertcoin and Viacoin, the recent trend of forkcoins is really the same thing, the Forkgen project seems to suggest.
Two ardently denied Forkgen is something akin to joke.
“This is VERY SERIOUS. Read the FAQ,” he said. “Forkgen is the embodiment of Satoshi’s True Vision™ where if big blocks are good for scaling then many chains are even better.”
Instructions and Disclaimers
Binaries for NewsCapsule Cash (BMG) can be downloaded here for Windows, Mac and Linux. However, NewsCapsule cannot in any way guarantee the authenticity of these binaries that were provided by Forkgen — nor does Forkgen. Download and run the software at your own risk; and keep in mind that exposing private keys that hold value to untrusted software is a particularly bad idea.
Additionally, keep in mind that NewsCapsule merely created this software as an experiment; we have no intention of actually maintaining it, nor will we support NewsCapsule Cash in any other way.
Want to create your own NewsCapsule fork? With the coupon code “GreatLeaderCraig”, NewsCapsule readers get 50 off for the next 6 days. (Make sure to double check that this discount is really subtracted before making the payment; the Forkgen website was having some issues at the time of writing this article.)
Finally, NewsCapsule does not endorse using this service: We cannot guarantee the authenticity of Forkgen or its software in any way.
