Bitcoin Cash Forked Up, and the Community is Not Impressed

With incredulous poetic justice, in-fighting amongst developers at Bitcoin Cash is causing a major disturbance within the crypto communities to the point that more hard forks and chain splits seem inevitable.

In addition, one of the developers, Craig Wright, is claiming to be the real Satoshi Nakamoto (the pseudonym used by the inventor of Bitcoin, who the NSA and other agencies have failed to discover on their own).

If forking once from Bitcoin could create an enormous amount of wealth for a small group of dissenters, why not do it again, and again? Two groups are emerging from Bitcoin Cash’s community, calling themselves Bitcoin ABC and Bitcoin SV.

Bitcoin ABC has very limited information about them so far, only providing a short road map that borrows proven technology from several other projects (like Graphene from Bitshares, Steemit, and EOS), and creates a very non-Bitcoin-like cyborg that actually sounds like it will work very well. It keeps the Bitcoin name and is forking off of the current Bitcoin Cash chain, because they feel that is the proper direction Bitcoin Cash should be going.

Bitcoin SV (SV stands for Satoshi’s Vision) is a fork of Bitcoin Cash that will be happening earlier than Bitcoin ABC. The changes it makes to the code will be adding four new operations that were originally disabled in Bitcoin, and raises the block size to 128MB to handle more transactions.

Their differences are complaints about upcoming smart contracts features being added to Bitcoin Cash. Reports say there has not been any attempts to come to a compromise, only threats to hard fork and split Bitcoin Cash, which given the history of Bitcoin Cash, sounds very intentional. The next hard fork upgrade to Bitcoin Cash is scheduled for November 2018. It is expected Bitcoin SV will launch before that time, but no date has been announced.

Citing ideological differences and attempting to do the right thing no longer holds any validity with the people who forked off of Bitcoin last year - claiming that Bitcoin was no longer decentralized and a coin of the people, while creating one of the least decentralized, ‘impossible-for-the-common-man-to-participate-in-the-network’ projects in cryptocurrency history.

Bitcoin Cash partnered with Bitmain to create a currency their machines could mine almost exclusively right out of the gate. Bitmain has been accused on several occasions of using their miners for generating wealth for the company by “excessive testing” before releasing the used machines into the market, packaging them as brand new. While they deny this practice, the fact that Bitmain holds an incredible amount of wealth in Bitcoin Cash reserves only highlights the unethical and deceitful practices this partnership encourages.

Is the disagreement in how to upgrade the Bitcoin Cash technology a real reason to dissent, or a scapegoat to create more wealth in the pockets of participating developers and experienced market manipulators? If it works once, why not do it again? After all, this proven method of wealth generation by forking will continue yearly.

Vitalik Buterin, the creator of Ethereum, likens Craig Wright’s actions to the infamous Ponzi scheme Bitconnect, calling his new proposal, Bitcoin SV, by its more appropriate name “Bitcoin Craig”, stating, that he (Wright) can have the BCC ticker symbol Bitconnect left behind when it was shut down.

Another damning indictment of the fork being a cash grab is a quote from another Bitcoin developer, Thomas Zander, who states, "Both ABC and nChain are trying to hard fork. Both of them are not giving any rationale why. Both of them are completely not responsive to any feedback or any compromise requests from the rest of the ecosystem."

According to a Coindesk report, veteran Bitcoin Cash developers are wary of both sides, saying that they are “acting out”, and would instead like a compromise to be arranged between both parties.

In many observers’ opinions, these actions are not illegal, just highly unethical, and very confusing (for the users who already see 50+ coins using “Bitcoin” in their name). Furthermore, if Craig Wright had concrete proof he was the real Satoshi, he would have applied to patent the Bitcoin name a long time ago to prevent this confusion, as well as make billions of dollars.

The open source community is about working together to build things that will shape the future of technology. Most developers never see a dime for their years’ worth of efforts to this movement, that has impacted the world almost as much as Bitcoin. Unfortunately, many people involved in crypto have lost their way and are no different than the crooked businessmen, overcharging banks and political lobbyists they never wanted to become.

How to stop this? Simple. Don’t use their coins. Don’t trade them, don’t hold them, don’t use them to buy goods. You have a choice with crypto, so choose wisely. Always do your own research; these are far from the only crooks out there.