> To use an imperfect analogy from corporate finance, you could think of the fork as a spinoff. For most of PayPal’s life, it was owned by eBay. Holders of the EBAY ticker owned the parent company eBay, which encompassed eBay proper as well as PayPal. On the day of the spinoff, eBay stockholders received, for each EBAY share they owned, one PYPL share. At the same time, they got to keep their existing EBAY shares.
This is a misleading analogy, because EBAY holders can only be granted PYPL shared because EBAY owned PYPL. So unless BCH was an existing entity before the fork, which was covered under BTC already, this analogy doesn’t capture what happened here.
We’re not talking about companies, were talking about distributed databases. Databases contain information, and can be copied, as opposed to a company. A better analogy would be someone scraping Twitter, making a copy called Twooter with all past tweets from Twitter, and then forking off from there with their own “twoots”. In other words: it’s a copy, not a stock split.
This is a misleading analogy, because EBAY holders can only be granted PYPL shared because EBAY owned PYPL. So unless BCH was an existing entity before the fork, which was covered under BTC already, this analogy doesn’t capture what happened here.
We’re not talking about companies, were talking about distributed databases. Databases contain information, and can be copied, as opposed to a company. A better analogy would be someone scraping Twitter, making a copy called Twooter with all past tweets from Twitter, and then forking off from there with their own “twoots”. In other words: it’s a copy, not a stock split.