With the hindsight of about a week, we can look at what happened after the newest hard fork over Bitcoin Cash.
Even after a lot of the dust has settled, there’s still no clear victor in this cryptocurrency war. In the sense that both of these fork results are still listed on major exchanges, the whole thing continues to be kind of a muddled mess.
Tech reports are showing that while Bitcoin ABC, backed by personalities like Roger Ver and Bitmain’s Jihan Wu, has enjoyed favorable status on exchanges, Bitcoin SV, spearheaded by Craig Stephen Wright, has also been accepted at Binance and other places such as Kraken, albeit with a disclaimer on its eligibility standards.
It’s not hard to imagine some of the drama that’s ensuing around this coin split – especially when you look at Craig Stephen Wright and his dubious claim that he actually invented Bitcoin as the mysterious Satoshi.
That particular controversy notwithstanding, there’s a serious debate about how Bitcoin Cash or any other cryptocurrency should be delimited as far as block sizes. Bitcoin ABC takes a more moderate approach with its adjustable philosophy, while Bitcoin SV mandates a significant block size increase up to 128 MB.
But that’s not the only difference between the two – they both have their cheerleaders and enthusiasts, and they’re both wreaking their own forms of havoc on the markets.
Some analysts even argue that the Bitcoin cash fork last week is responsible for the bloodbath that you see when you look at the BTC ticker – could Bitcoin Cash really be responsible for BTC continuing to lie down under $4000 like a TKO’d fighter in Nintendo’s Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out?
Whether or not you attribute the current Bitcoin slump to BCH activity, wholly or partially, either way it’s still important to look at what happened, including news of “SV failure,” which was described today at Cointelegraph:
“On Nov. 19, Peter Rizun, chief scientist of Bitcoin Unlimited, reported that BCHSV suffered a blockchain reorganization (a situation when a node or a blockchain client needs to disregard blocks they have previously considered as accepted). Emin Gun Sirer, creator of the world’s first cryptocurrency to deploy a PoW concept and vocal critic of BCH, soon questioned BCHSV’s level of decentralization.”
Trust and proof of work consensus have also been issues.
“The BTC community had wandered too far off the reservation,” writes Jonald Fyookball at Bitcoin.com, characterizing the lack of consensus that “forked” BCH again. “They focused on making it cheap to run a node even if it was expensive to send a transaction. They valued being a digital commodity over being a payment system. They worked on ethereal problems of the future rather than the real problems facing us today. And worst of all, they allowed censorship to flourish.”
All of that is leading to significant concern about stability and clarity in BCH and related markets. Let’s take another week to see how the adoption of both new coins pan out and whether more of a congealing sentiment will help stanch the flow from the current crypto bloodletting.
