Who is winning the hash war

The latest Bitcoin Cash (BCH) network update caused a complex battle, and the blockchain was split into two: BCH ABC is in a corner and BCH SV is in the other.

Here's what they both represent, and who is currently winning the hash war.

BCH, ABC, SV: Who is fighting and why?

Bitcoin Cash emerged on 1 August 2017 after exiting the original Bitcoin blockchain (BTC) via a fixed fork.

The separation occurred in an attempt to manage the scalability problem of BTC. A part of the Bitcoin community, led by Roger Ver, has rallied to increase the size of the Bitcoin block. Specifically, they wanted to see Bitcoin flourish as a transactional currency, not as an investment, citing Satoshi Nakamoto's white paper and its parts on anonymous transactions. After meeting the resistance of the rest of the community, a rigid fork proved to be the only option for the creation of BCH.

Twice a year, the BCH network runs hard forks as part of the planned protocol updates. The last hard fork, scheduled for November 15, was interrupted by a competing proposal that was not compatible with the original roadmap. As a result, the BCH community has been split into three fractions: Bitcoin ABC, Bitcoin Unlimited and Bitcoin SV. Cointelegraph has covered the nature of those parts in a separate article. Here is a brief summary:

Bitcoin ABC (Adjustable Cap Blocks) represents the conservative wing that aims to preserve Bitcoin Cash from radical changes. It is led by Roger Ver, among others, and has strong supporters represented by Bitmain, as well as the main Binance, Coinbase and other exchanges.

Their wing believes that the basic structure of BCH is "healthy" and "does not need any radical change". However, the Bitcoin ABC roadmap leaves room for further network developments and minimizing transaction costs, which seems to be its main priority.

Bitcoin SV (Satoshi & # 39; s Vision), on the other hand, was founded on August 16 – not long before the fateful fork – by a blockchain development company affiliated to Craig Wright, who previously declared himself Satoshi Nakamoto. It is supported by niche news such as CoinGeek, CalvinAyre and Bitcoin.org.

The reformers attempt to restore "the original Satoshi protocol" by changing the current BCH structure. Specifically, this would imply total overwriting of Bitcoin ABC network scripts and increasing the size of the 32 MB BCH block to a maximum of 128 MB to increase the capacity and scale of the network.

There is also a neutral wing represented by Bitcoin Unlimited, whose leaders have proposed a compromise solution called "Bitcoin Unlimited strategy for the November 2018 hard fork". In essence, this proposition suggested the possibility of modifying both Bitcoin ABC and Bitcoin SV, allowing miners to enhance with their rating during the hard fork.

Hash wars: conservatives are winning

On November 15, miners supporting both implementations started the fork process. As a result, at approximately 1:00 pm EST the first ABC block was found by the Bitcoin.com mining pool at the height of block 556767. Several minutes later, at 13:22 EST, SV miners processed the blockade. 556767 on a separate chain. Therefore, the BCH blockchain was divided into two blockchains, respectively BCH ABC and BCH SV.

To assert the dominance of BCH ABC, his ally Jihan Wu, co-founder of Bitmain, allegedly mobilized some of his mining forces. Jihan was quoted as saying:

"I'm not going to start a war with [Craig Wright]because if I do – moving the hash power from BTC mining to BCH mining – the price of BTC will download below the annual support; it could even culminate $ 5,000. But since then [Craig Wright] It's relentless, I'm ready to fight to death! "

Roger Ver's mining pool Bitcoin.com has also announced that it will redirect the hash feed from BTC to BCH ABC, even if only for a day.

In response, Craig Wright of Bitcoin SV claimed that only continuous mining would determine the winner. "The competition continues until one dies like we do not stop", he announced on Twitter.

According to forl.lol statistics, the total hashrate of BCH rose from 9.54% to 15.43% from November 10 to November 17, which covers most of the hard-to-fork battle. As a result, the BTC hashrate declined by seven percent in those days, rising from 90.46 percent to 84.57 percent. This demonstrates that indeed a considerable amount of mining energy had been moved from BTC to BCH during rush hour of the conflict. This in turn could have affected the price of BTC, as for the menacing comment by Wright mentioned above, and therefore on the encrypted market, which has notoriously collapsed last week.

Source: fork.lol

Exchanges begin to pass the BCH ticker to BCH

At first, many important cryptographic exchanges, including Coinbase, Bitstamp, is Poloniex, among other things, had interrupted the trade and withdrawals of BCH for an indefinite period of time, waiting for the dust to settle down.

However, although Craig Wright declared "continuous competition to death" and the conflict is technically still ongoing, BCH ABC seems to be the current leader. According to statistics from the Bitcoin Cash Coin Dance data aggregator, BCH ABC is two blocks away from its rival, BCH SV, at the time of printing, although the juxtaposition briefly changed in favor of BCH SV at some point.

Source: Coin.Dance

Source: Coin.Dance

More importantly, however, BCH ABC has accumulated more work tests (PoW) than BCH SV of almost 50%, while the respective hashrates are almost identical at this point.

On November 16, the Binance exchange broke the silence, having completed the distribution of Bitcoin Cash ABC (BCHABC) and Bitcoin Cash SV (BCHSV) to its customers in a 1: 1 ratio and opened trading on both pairs. Currently, the BCHSV / USDT pair is trading at $ 123.62 while BCHABC / USDT is set at $ 287.

In addition, over the next two days, over 10 major stock exchanges have awarded the "BCH" ticker to the BCH ABC rule set, thus naming the winner in this complex battle. These exchanges include Bittrex, Kraken, Bitstamp, Coinbase, among others. Some of these services continue to exchange BCH SV under BCHSV ticker, while Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao took Twitter for to announce that both tickers – BCHABC and BCHSV – "will remain".

BCH, in turn, is losing its value since 7 November. Starting with press-time, according to CoinMarketCap.com, it is trading at $ 384, dropping by around 30% in the last 10 days. Meanwhile, the rest of the market is constantly recovering and most of the cryptocurrencies are recording slight gains from the press.

Source: Coin360