Bitcoin Cash Hard Fork alert! We’ve got a lot of drama in the Bitcoin Cash community as the hard fork approaches on November 15th. CryptoTraders Pro is here to give you the latest. First things first, Coinbase has announced that they’re prepared to support the Bitcoin Cash hard-fork roadmap published by Bitcoincash.org. This latest announcement has further entrenched the battle-lines of an ongoing civil war in the Bitcoin Cash community.
Twice a year, the Bitcoin Cash network hard forks as part of scheduled maintenance and network upgrades. This year, however, Bitcoin Cash’s short life-span is proving to already have divergent use-cases for the cryptocurrency, and it’s highlighted by two drastically different solutions.
On August 8th, Bitcoin ABC, the leading implementation of the Bitcoin Cash network, published its proposal to change the network’s consensus protocols. Bitcoin ABC proposed the new fork as Bitcoin ABC 0.18.0, which would add new features such as smart contract abilities, oracle services, and scaling improvements to the Bitcoin Cash network.
A week later, the CEO of blockchain research firm nChain, Jimmy Nguyen, announced its implementation of the new hard fork, called Bitcoin SV. Bitcoin SV is the work of Craig Wright, a prominent member of the Bitcoin Cash community. Bitcoin SV aims to completely replace Bitcoin ABC’s scripts with its own and increase BCH’s block size from 32MB to a maximum size of 128MB.
Bitcoin ABC and Bitcoin SV’s implementations for the Bitcoin Cash hard fork are incompatible with one another. If both proposals move forward and are successful independently, then a split in the Bitcoin Cash network is possible on November 15th of this year. We’ve seen this happen before with Bitcoin core when Bitcoin Cash separated itself from the Bitcoin network in August of last year.
Acknowledging the risk of a potential chain split, Andrew Stone, the lead developer of Bitcoin Unlimited, currently the second most popular client used by the Bitcoin Cash network, proposed a middle-ground solution, dubbed BUIP098. Stone’s solution aims to implement the changes proposed by both Bitcoin ABC and Bitcoin SV. Stone’s proposal would require node operators, IE miners, to switch to the Bitcoin Unlimited client. Once miners switch over, features from Bitcoin ABC and Bitcoin SV can then both be activated through BIP 139 (miner voting) or emerging consensus.
Currently, according to Coin.Dance, at the time of this writing, the current support for the three potential Bitcoin Cash implementation is as follows: Bitcoin ABC (57%), BIP 139 (23%), and Bitcoin SV (5%). 45% of miners are also showing their support of current Bitcoin Cash implementations, in which no new features will be added.
There’s less than 2 weeks before November 15th Bitcoin Cash hard fork. Major businesses and miners have started to announce their positions on the Bitcoin Cash debate in the hopes that they’ll sway miner support. Bitcoin ABC has been endorsed by heavy hitters such as Bitmain, Binance, Bitcoin.com, and Coinbase. Bitcoin SV has garnered support from CoinGeek, Craigh Wright’s SV Pool, and Cobra, the owner of Bitcoin.org.
Where do you stand? Do you like BCH to begin with? If so, do you support ABC, SV, or BIP 139? Do you think these forks will hurt our community as a whole for mass adoption? Will Financial Institutions still be bullish about this new asset class? Let us know on our Facebook page!
