With the Bitcoin spin-off Bitcoin Cash, another spin-off took place on Sunday. Behind the fork is a group called Bitcoin ABC around the developer Amaury Sechet. Their goal was an update with a protocol change that was supposed to introduce a kind of mining tax at Bitcoin Cash: Eight percent of the mining income should be automatically transferred in order to finance developers working on the protocol of the crypto currency. This led to tough opposition in the community – and with block number 661647 ultimately to a hard fork with separate blockchains.

So far it clearly looks like the overwhelming majority of miners will opt for client software without miner tax. The opposite side, called Bitcoin Cash Node (BCHN), which refuses to submit, should have triumphed and probably carried on the name Bitcoin Cash and the ticker symbol BCH. The spokesman here is, among others, the crypto investor Roger Ver, who criticized ABC’s plans as a “dream of centralized Soviet-style planners”. Already in advance around 70 – 80 percent of the miners signals to favor BCHN.

Only six blocks for new chain Since the chains were separated, the ABC network has, according to the service coin.dance can only generate six blocks for the blockchain with new rules at the moment. The opposite side, however, comes across 100 blocks and clearly dominates the field. According to coin.dance, the hashing performance at BCHN is 1, 49 Exahash / s, ABC only comes to 0, 037 Exahash / s. However, it is not surprising that the miners primarily rely on a network where they do not have to pay a fee. ABC was only able to score points with the nodes in the network, around 35 percent accept the protocol change here.

In the run-up to the fork, some exchanges were rather skeptical about a Bitcoin ABC coin. Coinbase announced that it only supports BCHN and does not accept ABC. Kraken also sided with BCHN and declared that an ABC coin would only be listed if the network would be long-term 10 Percent of the Bitcoin cash hashrate. Binance said it favored the chain with the greatest hashing performance.

It remains to be seen whether Bitcoin ABC will become viable cryptocurrency at all. As part of the fork, the price of Bitcoin Cash fell slightly and is currently around 249 US dollars. According to figures from Coinmarketcap, Bitcoin Cash is currently number six among the cryptocurrencies in terms of market capitalization.

Judean Popular Front forks the Judean Popular Front Bitcoin Cash separated 2017 from Bitcoin and was the pioneer of a whole series of forks of Bitcoin. The bone of contention at the time was the inadequate scalability of the cryptocurrency and the related question of whether the bitcoin’s block size, which is limited to 1 MB, should not be increased. There was a split over that, and since a fork in August 2017 there are separate blockchains and separate currencies. Bitcoin Cash relies on larger block sizes in order to cope with more transactions onchain.

2018 there was then another fork of Bitcoin Cash, after tough public disputes, Bitcoin SV split off around the Australian Craig Wright. Wright had previously made headlines claiming he was Bitcoin inventor Satoshi Nakamoto without providing any evidence.

(axk)