Hello Steemians! We saw a big decrease in cryptocurrencies price across the board a couple of days back. Many people are attributing the decline to the infighting within the Bitcoin Cash community. I am more of person who believes that market movements are generally random and most of the time irrational. The mass media just like to find reasons (usually after the fact) for market movements. That being said, the Bitcoin Cash infighting does worry me a little as it demonstrates how fragile crypto communities can be and how centralized hash powers can potentially bring harm to projects based on Proof-of-Work (PoW).
A Little Background
15 November 2018 was the date planned for the hardfork of Bitcoin Cash. There are 2 camps, namely Bitcoin Cash ABC and Bitcoin Cash SV (Satoshi's Vision), involved in this hardfork and each of them wants to make different changes to the protocol. There is a Reddit post which summarizes the key differences between the 2:
ABC introduces some changes to protocol that increase Graphene block propagation technology performance by 700% and are a groundwork for parallelization of validation. Also a new OP_CHECKDATASIG operation that enables some interesting capabilities like doublespends forfeits.
SV bumps the constant from 32 MB to 128MB for block size limit despite stress tests show the ecosystem struggles even at 32MB. Also reintroduces OP_LSHIFT, OP_RSHIFT, OP_MUL, OP_INVERT but the first two work significantly different than the original opcodes so it's not quite reintroduction - rather replacement. There are also SV plans, promises and threats beyond this fork that are so far only tweets and articles from Craig S. Wright: stealing coins of people that split their coins with OP_CHECKDATASIG, stealing burnt coins, stealing lost coins, removing P2SH addresses, patent lawsuits.
ABC is favored by personnel like Roger Ver, Wu Jihan and John McAfee. While SV is led by Craig S. Wright. Due to these differences, and both wanting to be the "true" Bitcoin Cash post-fork, there is a possibility of a Hash war between the 2 camps.
Hash War
Source
Bitcoin Cash is a PoW system which relies on computational power or hash power to produce blocks and sign transactions. Therefore, whichever side having the highest hash power will be the "true" Bitcoin Cash. Craig Wright, with the backing of Coingeek, is said to have enough hash power to launch a 51% attack on ABC. If the attack is successful, it can cause catastrophic outcome to Bitcoin Cash ABC network and potentially causing it to rollback transactions.
As a result of this potential threat, the supporters of Bitcoin Cash ABC loaded up their arsenal of hash power by transferring their hash power from mining Bitcoin to Bitcoin Cash ABC. By doing so, it causes a lose-lose situation where miners of both Bitcoin Cash ABC and SV would have been better off mining Bitcoin. In fact, at the point of writing, it is 73% more profitable to mine Bitcoin.
To me, this is totally illogical and they are behaving like school kids fighting over toys. I fully agree with this Tweet on this topic,
Source
What's Next?
The Bitcoin Cash infighting is now a game of chicken with millions of dollars at stake. Both camps are losing millions daily in terms of opportunity costs. The market fears that if the hash war deepens, both camps will start to sell some Bitcoin to continue the war, thereby resulting in more downward pressure to Bitcoin price.
Again, I think it is difficult to predict what is going to happen. My thoughts are that if this infighting is going to prolong, it may bring some opportunities to other altcoins that are making progress. I read a very interesting article today on Traki, a major departmental store in Venezuela, started to adopt cryptocurrencies.
Source
I will like to remind everyone that progress is still being made and fundamentally cryptocurrencies are getting stronger in terms of technology and adoption. Personally, I am focusing on quality projects and investing in cryptocurrencies that are slowly gaining adoption.
What are your thoughts on the Bitcoin Cash hard fork? Share your views with me. If you like what you read, do give it an upvote and give me a follow. Thanks for reading!
Projects/Services I am working on:
You can find me in these communities:
It's inevitable that there will be differences in opinions, squabbles and quarrels. Let's hope that they will resolve their quarrels like sensible adults. We will see what happens next.
Indeed. We can only hope that most people come to senses and stop supporting these kind of projects
Posted using Partiko Android
Should take bets on how long SV can last looks set to be a slow bleed
Both sides are bleeding. But I think SV is the happier side as they took value away from BCH and becomes a top 20 coin in terms of market cap. There are many other projects spending millions trying to achieve that to no avail
Posted using Partiko Android
On the bright side, more money will then flow to altcoins which have a solid development and use case like STEEM. I hope this is a case or cryptos will just slide down even more. Upvoted!
That's a very optimistic view. I do hope so as well. Unfortunately, most altcoins have their price anchored on BTC price. With BTC price tanking, the price of altcoins will inevitably be lower. It's going to take months to see any form of price decoupling.
Posted using Partiko Android
About The Hash Wars, have you seen this interesting development?
https://steemit.com/cryptocurrency/@elektropunkz/satoshi-is-back
Thanks, I will give the article a read
Posted using Partiko Android
Very good report and analysis over the 2018 hash war. Helps me understand what's going on. Also I am grateful for your !tip on Traki.
Thanks for reading and the nice tip! I'm glad you find it useful
Posted using Partiko Android
Hi @culgin!
Your post was upvoted by @steem-ua, new Steem dApp, using UserAuthority for algorithmic post curation!
Your UA account score is currently 3.101 which ranks you at #9344 across all Steem accounts.
Your rank has dropped 7 places in the last three days (old rank 9337).
In our last Algorithmic Curation Round, consisting of 252 contributions, your post is ranked at #198.
Evaluation of your UA score:
Feel free to join our @steem-ua Discord server
This post has received a 31.25% upvote from @blockgatorsarmy!
🎁 Hi @culgin! You have received 0.1 STEEM tip from @daily.readings!
@daily.readings wrote lately about: Verified / Validated Transfer Funds Methods At November 10, 2018 Feel free to follow @daily.readings if you like it :)
Sending tips with @tipU - how to guide :)
Congratulations,
you just received a 12.70% upvote from @steemhq - Community Bot!
Wanna join and receive free upvotes yourself?
Vote for
steemhq.witnesson Steemit or directly on SteemConnect and join the Community Witness.This service was brought to you by SteemHQ.com