Forking into Infinity

In mid 2017 some members of Bitcoin community including Roger Ver had expressed their concerns about implementation of Segwit without increasing the block size in order to allow for Bitcoin to scale.

At the time Bitcoin transaction fees were also very high, limiting its use as a transaction currency and instead forcing people to treat Bitcoin as a digital investment - locked away for the future. Although second layer solutions such as lightning were coming to Bitcoin - some members of community decided that only way to get what they want was to hard fork. They implemented their own version of the code increasing the block size to eight megabytes and on 1st of August 2018 Bitcoin Cash BCH started its life.

While most forked coins just copy the code of the coin they are forking, Bitcoin cash had retained a copy the Bitcoin BTC blockchain up to the fork resulting in everyone who was holding Bitcoin BTC to also receive Bitcoin Cash BCH, a type of 'psychological experiment' to see if people would ascribe value to something that just appeared into existence out of nothing.

While most people stayed mutual some characterized Bitcoin Cash as: a spin-of, a clone, an alt-coin. While Roger Ver who was pushing for adoption of Bitcoin Cash had stated that Bitcoin Cash is the "true bitcoin" and that it was more in line with the white paper proposed by Satishi in 2008.

Yesterday - Thursday 15th November 2018, just over 1 year after its inception, the Bitcoin cash network had forked again. But since BCH hard forks twice a year as part of scheduled network upgrades why is this fork different?

While most hard forks happen regularly as part of network updates sometimes hard forks happen as a result of failure to reach consensus. This BCH fork was characterized by a dispute between some of the leading figures in the BCH community. These forks are the result of a divided community where one group breaks away to implement their own version of code.

It might sound like a good idea at first but inevitably it becomes very hard to support the ecosystem of a clone coin even if the launch costs are minimal. These 'political forks' split the community into smaller and smaller fragments and as the developers who fork away do so in disregard of consensus they run the risk of splitting among themselves again and again forking into infinity.

This is what we see happening with Bitcoin Cash. At first the BCH community split from BTC and now they are splitting among themselves. One camp that supports Roger Ver and Jihan Wu with their Bitcoin Cash ABC ( mouthful ) and the second camp supporting Craig Wright and Calvin Ayre with their Bitcoin SV ( SV stands for Satoshis Vision )

Bitcoin SV plans to increase the block size of Bitcoin Cash to 128 mb.
Bitcoin ABC wants to keep the block size the same while implementing non-cash transactions.

There was also a third implementation known as Bitcoin Unlimited which wanted to allow miners to decide which block size they wanted to process. This implementation failed to get traction in the run up to the fork.

We are now left watching weather the network will transition to the ABC or the SV implementation. The winner will be the one who can produce the longest version of the block chain which is down to how much hash power they are able to put to work - and so the great hash war has begun.

But in all seriousness, is there even a need for all of this or is this all just bored billionaires trying to one up each other. Craig Wright had publicly stated that he would mine at a loss just to get ahead of Rogers and Juhans BCHABC implementation. At the time of writing the ABC implementation is actually ahead but not without controversy. It turns out Roger has pointed all hash power in his mining pools towards mining BCH puting him in the lead. This resulted in everyone who uses his mining pools to be forced to mine only BCH, something that has not just moral but also legal implementations.

Its too early to announce the winner and with Craig Wright stating that he will take over the Bitcoin Cash network and then attack other crytos including Bitcoin, this circus show is far from over. Will Calvin fork away from Craig? Maybe Jihan will disagree with Roger and they fork away with their own implementations? Will there even be a community left at that point?