Following the much-awaited hard fork, the Bitcoin Cash network has split into two new blockchains, yet again, this time- Bitcoin Cash Node [BCHN] and Bitcoin Cash ABC. A lot has been said and done. This is the second time that an ideological battle between the two camps of a prominent coin had quickly escalated to a controversial hard fork. Here’s how the event unfolded:
Bitcoin Cash Node Emerges As The Dominant
According to the data compiled by Coin Dance, the BCHN chain is currently 111 blocks ahead of Bitcoin Cash ABC. It is important to note that the dominant chain is being spearheaded by Roger Ver. Many industry experts have questioned the viability of the BCHA chain of Bitcoin Cash since, over the last 24-hours, there have been only 11 blocks mined. Whereas, 123 BCHN blocks have been mined during the same time period, according to data from Blockchair.
The hard fork has been disastrous for BCHA as its hash rate took a huge downturn after the fact. It is also important to note that the BCH hash rate has always been very low.
As noted by Nikita Zhavoronkov, the Lead Developer of Blockchair, only 0.6% of the BTC SHA-256 hash rate is required to 51% attack BCH. What is even more damaging is that with BCHA, it is just 0.05%. Hence a big solo miner can potentially attack and leave the BCHA network with malicious chain reorgs.
To top that, BCHA was currently being mined by just one miner at a “huge loss” giving rise to 100% control of the hash rate. The miner is also at the risk of losing the newly minted coins in an event of an attack.
It was Binance that mined that the last “common block” among Bitcoin Cash miners at #661647. The first block that split the blockchain was mined by AntPool. Even before the fork, nearly 80% of miners demonstrated support for BCHN, and hence hash power has been in BCHN’s favor soon after the split.
Bitcoin Cash’s Price Takes a Plunge
As the hard fork went live, BCH crashed significantly as investors continued to struggle with the uncertainty of the future of the network. Over the last seven days, Bitcoin Cash’s price dropped by nearly 9% despite a rather bullish week as Bitcoin and the peer altcoins climbed an upward trajectory. At the time of writing, BCH was priced at $248.9.
The Controversy
The contentious hard fork arose from a massive conflict between the two camps Bitcoin Cash ABC and BCHN. The former’s camp, led by Developer Amaury Séchet, essentially intended to deploy an Infrastructure Funding Plan [IFP] that would introduce a “miner tax” of 8%., this implying that 8% of the miner rewards would be distributed to the team behind the network.
This was vehemently opposed by the BCHN camp stating that reducing miner rewards was not a good option since this could bring about centralization fears emerging out of the network’s development around just one team of devs.