Ready, steady, go: A short recap of the upcoming Bitcoin Cash (BCH) hard fork
|- Market players are nervous as the process might be messy.
- Traders hope for free coins.
Bitcoin Cash is about to fork this Thursday. The fourth largest cryptocurrency will split in two, which will lead to creating a new digital asset. The coins will get names Bitcoin ABC (core Bitcoin Cash) and Bitcoin SV (Satoshi’s Vision).
The fork is caused by deep discrepancies between developers and miners vision concerning the coins future path of development. Once the disputed software update is released, a group of miners switch to it and start using the new version, while the other group continues operating within the old network with old rules. Thus, two separate chains are created.
Click here if you want to know more about forks.
Bitcoin Cash itself was born from a split on Bitcoin mainnet. Now its time to fork the fork. The disagreement arose around developer Amaury Sechet proposal to tweak transaction ordering. As the debates escalated, two prominent figures of the cryptocurrency universe - Roger Ver and Craig Wright - took the opposite views on the subject matter.
However, the success of the competing chains will be defined by miners who hold the power to mine new coins. The more miners support the coin, the better it is positioned.
Currently, the industry experts believe that Bitcoin ABC will dominate. But according to CoinDance research, over 60% of miners are expected to support Bitcoin SV implementation of Bitcoin Cash.
As for the cryptocurrency exchanges, the overwhelming majority announced the support for the hard fork, which means that Bitcoin Cash holders will receive new cryptocurrency in the amount equal to their Bitcoin Cash balance at the time of the network snapshot. Meanwhile, BitMEX decided to ditch Bitcoin SV.
“Bitcoin Cash is expected to conduct a hard fork upgrade on 15 November 2018. There are two competing incompatible hard fork upgrade proposals, with the associated clients being Bitcoin ABC and Bitcoin SV. On settlement, the BCHZ18 contract will settle at a price on the Bitcoin ABC side of any split and will NOT include the value of Bitcoin SV,” BitMEX explained in the blog post.
Bitcoin Cash has been very volatile ahead of the hard fork: The coin spiked to $646 on November 7 before retreating to $515 by the time of writing. BCH/USD has lost 15% of its value in recent 7 days.
BCH/USD, the daily chart
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