Bitcoin Cash on Threshold of Hardfork?

The Bitcoin Cash community is divided into two camps. The Australian entrepreneur and "self-proclaimed Satoshi Nakamoto" Craig Wright and the creator of CoinGeek Calvin Ayre opposed the updates on the network and offered their version of its further development.

The network recently celebrated its anniversary. Bitcoin Cash was presented as digital cash, which mostly corresponds to the original idea of Satoshi Nakamoto. It was contrasted with bitcoin, which had growing scaling problems and significantly increased transaction fees. Roger Ver and Craig Wright said that Bitcoin Cash is well suited for daily payments, and not just for investment purposes.

Prior to SegWit activation, the bitcoin block size was only one megabyte. In April 2017, the rate of the first cryptocurrency began to grow. Bitcoin attracted attention of the broad masses. This caused the exponential growth in the number of users of the network and increased a transaction demand. To solve these problems, two solutions were proposed in the crypto community.

Supporters of Bitcoin Unlimited (BU) offered to significantly increase the size of the block by means of hardfork. The miners were supporters of this approach. They believed that a larger block would unload the blockchain, as well as increase the profitability of the production of the cryptocurrency due to the growth of the total commission. The supporters of the Segregated Witness softfork offered to optimize the structure of the block. This decision involved the separation of transaction signatures from the transfer process.

As a result, the compromise protocol SegWit2x was proposed, which implied the activation of Segregated Witness with the subsequent increase in the block size to 2 MB. This decision was not supported by all. The development team announced the abandonment of SegWit2x while maintaining the current structure of the bitcoin block, but with an increase in the block size to 8 MB.

Consequently, on August 1, 2017, the Bitcoin Cash hardfork took place, as a result of which the network of the first cryptocurrency was divided into two chains. The holders of Bitcoin have the opportunity in a 1: 1 ratio to get the number of new BCH (EXANTE: Bitcoin.Cash) coins corresponding to their balances. After a while, the Bitcoin Cash network began to develop its own hard disks, mainly aimed at increasing productivity.

The conflict occurred after the release of the Bitcoin ABC client (v. 0.18.0) with a number of updates, including the function of smart contracts supporting atomic swaps. Wright and Eyre said they were against these changes and offered their development to Bitcoin SV. It involves increasing the block from 32 to 128 MB and independently changing the Bitcoin ABC scripts. The description of the technology says that it is intended for miners who support the original vision of bitcoin. Craig and Ayre are opposed to optional changes in the original code.

Calvin Ayer has promised to direct all his power to support Bitcoin SV. At the same time, its mining pool is the largest producer of Bitcoin Cash. Both groups plan to make changes to the network code in November, while Bitcoin ABC and Bitcoin SV are incompatible.

The co-founder of bitcoin.org under the nickname Cobra tweeted that the reason for the disagreement was the incompetence of developers who promote their ideas instead of seeking compromises. As an example, he led the leading Bitcoin Cash developer Amaury Séchet, who was blocked in the corporate channel in Slack in early August after statements about a new consensus algorithm. Séchet believes that the cause of the ban was a conflict with Craig Wright.

Vitalik Buterin urged not to compromise with Wright to prevent a split in the community.

WHY IS IT IMPORTANT?