Lightning Network creator Tadge Dryja is developing an experimental tool he hopes will help bitcoin users safely claim their newly created bitcoin cash.
To recap, on August 1, a group of users and mining pools who didn't agree with bitcoin's technical direction split off to create a new cryptocurrency, bitcoin cash, in the hopes of winning over users. And because of the way it "forked" from the blockchain, most users of bitcoin at the time are now left with an equal amount of bitcoin cash, and those funds are tied to their existing wallets.
Free cryptocurrency. Sounds great, right? The bad part is that forks open the possibility of "replay attacks," where transactions on one chain are duplicated on the other, and which have lost users' funds in the past.