Journalist: Nadeen Gitana | Editor: Teresa Wang, April Cho
A day before the hard fork, bitcoin cash price just dropped almost 18%. Hard fork is expected to take place tomorrow will result in two coins, BCH ABC and BCH SV. What was originally supposed to be a bi-annual upgrade to the BCH chain is turning into a possible chain split. News outlets and social media present what comes across like a reality show spectacle starring the real housewives of BCH— Craig Wright (CTO of nChain), Calvin Ayre (CEO of Coingeek), Jimmy Nguyen (CEO of nChain), Amaury Sechet (lead developer of Bitcoin ABC), Roger Ver (CEO of bitcoin.com), Jihan Wu (CEO of Bitmain) and company.
Should you care? Yes.
Current BCH holders can benefit from the fork as they can double their holdings with a new coin. In fact, a small pump in the BCH price could be seen this past week. However, having more tokens might not be merrier. As forks can be dangerous. It might open both the legacy chain and the forked chain to replay attacks. Currently, there is no replay protection in the planned BCH upgrades. Moreover, the BCH community’s inability to reach public consensus can have negative affects towards greater adoption of cryptocurrencies. Frequent hard forks might limit investors’ trust in cryptocurrencies.
Why BCH might split into two camps?
There are three major camps in the BCH hard fork saga; Bitcoin ABC, Bitcoin SV and Bitcoin Unlimited. The first two are the one’s who are unable to come to a consensus on the planned upgrades. Bitcoin Unlimited proposed a compromise to both camps and to the BCH community in case ABC and SV do go through with a fork.
When BCH was first created, Adam Stone, the lead developer of Bitcoin Unlimited proposed that every six months BCH undergo a hard fork to upgrade the chain for potential major use cases that may come about. So far, BCH has gone through two upgrades, this is their third.
Below is a quick summary of the proposed changes from the different groups:
Bitcoin ABC: (Proposed by Amaury Sechet and supported by Roger Ver and Jihan Wu)
Permit smart contract validation: Improve the BCH scripting language to permit validation from like an oracle or cross-chain atomic swaps.
Lay the foundation for future scaling: Implement CTOR (Canonical Transaction Ordering Proposal)
Bitcoin SV: (Proposed by Craig Wright’s nChain and supported by Coingeek’s Calvin Ayre)
BCH should only be fore cash transactions not as smart contracts. This is the true Satoshi Vision hence the name Bitcoin SV. Should reinstate old opcodes.
Don’t implement CTOR. It has not been tested enough yet.
Allow larger transaction: Increase the block size from 8MB to 128MB.
Bitcoin Unlimited: (Proposed by its lead developer Adam Stone and supported by the rest of his team)
Stone argues that both proposals above are mutually compatible and that it is ridiculous to split a community. In a forum where he proposed the changes back in August he stated that “Given the ‘no changes, no matter how reasonable, except mine’ strategy being pursued by both of these organizations, I can only sadly conclude that this is again about power and ego not about technical merit and end user adoption.” As a result, he proposed the following:
A feature that will allow miners to turn “on” or “off” the features. By allowing such a feature Stone argues that miners “running the BUcash full node can quickly react to any hash-power surprises”.
The Spectacle: Get your popcorn out
Most major exchanges, Coinbase and Binance, are supporting Bitcoin ABC implementations. At the end of the day the chain that miner nodes choose to continue to mine will win. At the moment, Bitcoin SV controls more of the mining hash power. Below we can see the fight on social media between these various players.
As an observer of these events, it is frustrating to see members of the crypto community follow a Trumpian style of communicating with their community. People aggressively attack those they disagree with. While many people are working hard to promote incredible projects using Blockchain, there will always be others who put more energy on dramatics than solutions. One Twitter user summarized the entire BCH story best when they said “A group of people who can’t play with others can’t play well with each other and are splitting apart.”
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