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Bitcoin Cash Fork

The cryptosphere is gasping for breath with prices stabilizing and reaching its real value after the inflated prices in December 2017.

It has been well over half a year into the bear market but there is hardly any day in the cryptosphere that is not interesting.

And right now, the interest is around Bitcoin Cash.

For those of you who don’t know about Bitcoin Cash, it is a notorious fork of Bitcoin that came into existence last year in August as there was no solution of long-standing scaling issue of Bitcoin. Since then Bitcoin Cash (BCH) and Bitcoin (BTC) have gone separate ways, but BCH has continued to attack BTC repeatedly.

However, the good news is Bitcoin has handled the attacks comfortably and has become a more resilient network, thanks to BCH.

But the funny thing is, BCH is now on the verge of a chain split!

Yeah, you heard it right. BCH, which was a result of rage against Bitcoin, has itself fallen in the death trap with its creators having a hard time coming to a consensus. (PS: BCH is centralized, and this is the proof).

I know some of you might be thinking why split when you already split once from BTC owing to differences in opinion over scaling.

That’s exactly what we are going to discuss today.

So in this article, I am going to tell you:

  • What’s going on?
  • Who are all involved?
  • What do they want?
  • What should you do?

What’s Going On In The BCH Crew?

Bitcoin Cash, since its formation, has decided to hard fork every 6 months for planned protocol upgrades but only if the consensus is there.

This time, however, there is no consensus.

Bitcoin ABC Side [Bitman]

It all started when Bitcoin ABC, the most used Bitcoin Cash client, and its lead developer Amaury Séchet (@deadalnix), proposed a change in the upcoming November fork.

The changes go like this:

The specific features included in the November 15th upgrade, and provided by Bitcoin ABC 0.18.0, are:

  • A new opcode called OP_CHECKDATASIG that improves the BCH scripting language to permit the validation of messages from outside the blockchain. This will enable users such as the use of oracles and cross-chain atomic contracts.
  • The introduction of canonical transaction ordering. This is a technical building block that lays the foundation for massive scaling improvements in the future.
  • Several minor technical fixes and improvements.

These changes are part of ABC’s plan to make BCH the most scalable, usable and extensible blockchain. It further opens the doors for non-cash transactions on the Bitcoin Cash blockchain.

Here is a sneak peek into ABC’s vision for BCH:

ABC's vision for BCH

ABC guys also want to keep the block size as 32 MB as of now, but the nChain people don’t agree on it.

ABC is also joined by Bitman who happens to control significant BCH mining power and have rejected the idea of Bitcoin SV (discussed later in the article)

To which Dr. Craig S Wright responded in this manner:

nChain Side [CoinGeek]

But the idea of ABC invited opposition from Dr. Craig S Wright and his company nChain.

They are against the idea of using Bitcoin Cash blockchain for non-cash transactions and also don’t support canonical transactions because of two reasons – one, it is not required currently, and two, it hasn’t had enough testing so far.

nChain has its support from one of the biggest BCH miners, i.e., CoinGeek who wants BCH to be restored to original BTC design when it was forked and also doesn’t supports canonical transactions. It also wants the current block size to be raised to 128 MB.

So what now?

nChain Releases Satoshi Vision

nChain Releases Satoshi Vision

To counter Bitcoin ABC’s proposal, Craig Wright-led nChain has started working on Bitcoin SV, a full node client implementation of BCH, which will not have new OP codes and canonical transactions. Instead, it will increase the size of the blocks.

This is being done on the request of CoinGeek miners who are supportive of miner’s community and are taking technical support from nChain.

They will also start onboarding new miners in the SV pool that will keep alive the dream of Satoshi to continue Bitcoin Cash as a payment protocol.

Mining Teams

Mining Teams

  • Bitcoin ABC & Bitman Side with 22.3 % hash power
  • CoinGeek & nChain Side with 25.4% hash power

The rest mining pools are with 52% hash power, and no one knows which side they will support. Thus, they have the potential to tilt the needle toward either team.

Which Side Is Roger Ver On?

Roger Ver

Talking about BCH and not mentioning Roger Ver is criminal, and in this case, so is not knowing which side he is on.

Well, for now, it looks like he is on the Bitman side and but he has said that he is still evaluating the issue and is not very vocal about it.

What Should You Do?

Here are some of the suggestions that you can follow:

  1. Avoid transactions for some days till the dust settles to avoid replay attacks on BCH chain.
  2. Keep your BCH private keys with you, not on a third party exchange like Coinbase.
  3. Use hardware wallets like the Ledger Nano S and Trezor.
  4. If you don’t have a hardware wallet, use software wallets like Mycelium, Jaxx, Coinomi, and Exodus to control your private keys.
  5. You can also use a paper wallet or brain wallet.
  6. If you hold your keys in a paper wallet or software wallet, wait for instructions on how to access your Bitcoin SV coins.
  7. You might also want to use Bitcoin Cobra client who is a new group of people launching their own BCH full node client with replay protection. It will not have either of the changes proposed above in the article but will provide replay protection. It also claims to have backing from 25% hash rate miners and support from big exchanges but only time will tell how legit are these claims.

Order Ledger Nano S | Order Trezor from the official site

Final thoughts on Bitcoin SV Fork

This fork is totally unnecessary for a BCH-like cryptocurrency which hasn’t even found a ground yet ever since forking from BTC in August 2017.

This will have significant repercussions and result in chaos in the industry, also resulting in many people losing money.

Lastly, I like the final nail in the coffin for Bitcoin SV and Craig Wright by Vitalik Buterin.

Now it is time you share this post with your friends on Twitter & Facebook who are HODLing BCH so that they can stay informed.

Also, do share your thoughts and questions in the comments section below. I will be waiting for them 🙂

Here are more articles for further reading:



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at 08:44
 
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