Developers are short of money and ask miners for it? After nearly a year of disagreement, BCH finally decided to fork

Source: Blockchain Frontier

Compiled by: Joyce Nuka-Cola

The two split up if there was any disagreement.

The Bitcoin Cash blockchain will undergo a controversial network upgrade on November 15. As with previous disagreements in the community, this upgrade may cause the Bitcoin Cash project to officially split into two chains, BCH ABC and BCH Node.

The fork was caused by developers' lack of money

ABC's core developer Amaury Séchet and others have repeatedly expressed their dissatisfaction with the current situation of BCH developers, the most important of which is the lack of funds for developers.

In order to solve this problem, the BitcoinABC (ABC) development team supported the "IFP Plan" proposed by Jiang Zhuoer. The plan, also known as the "Infrastructure Financing Plan", proposes to transfer 8% of blockchain mining rewards from BCH miners to the development team.

Séchet said at the second BCH developer conference in February this year that the emergence of the "IFP plan" was due to repeated requests from the Chinese community and has lasted for more than two years. "They want an infrastructure protocol, which is not a controversial idea in China, but it is obviously very controversial in the West."

Such an idea is not new, and the privacy coin Zcash has had a similar fund for years. But people in the BCH community think this is a robbery and believe that this practice runs counter to the decentralized spirit of cryptocurrency.

“Transferring a portion of the #BitcoinCash block reward to the development team is a continuation of Soviet-style central control,” BCH supporter and Bitcoin.com founder Roger Ver said in a tweet in August. “Please stop this.”

The Simple Ledger Protocol, which is used to issue security tokens on the Bitcoin Cash blockchain, has also expressed similar sentiments. A spokesperson for the protocol wrote in a blog post, "We believe that the practice of redirecting block rewards does not represent the spirit of Bitcoin Cash, and this is just a unilateral rule announced by the development team."

Due to the IFP plan, a new development team Bitcoin Cash Node was born in February this year. It is mainly composed of Bitcoin Unlimited and Electron Cash. The initiator is Freetrader, an early BCH developer who participated in the BCH fork in 2017 and is a member of ABC.

The team believes that donation programs are necessary, but should not be mandatory, otherwise it will easily lead to corruption and, more importantly, violate the spirit of blockchain decentralization.

BCHN is supported by the majority of miners

This round of network upgrade is scheduled for November 15, but the most likely outcome is that most miners will support the BCHN version instead of the ABC team's version, and the ABC version will become a minority. If this is the case, the upgrade will lead to a split, and Bitcoin Cash will eventually become two independent chains, each with its own value and audience.

Over the past few months, BCH miners have been discussing the future of the fork. So far, 82% of miners oppose the ABC team's proposal. Some people also write messages (such as "Powered by BCHN") in newly mined blocks to express their support for the BCHN version.

Many exchanges have stated that they plan to support network upgrades. However, if BCH forks, they will support the chain with more hash power (that is, more Bitcoin Cash miners support).

Cryptocurrency exchange Crypto, while expressing support for the network upgrade, added that “if competing chains emerge, Crypto plans to only support the chain with greater hash power.”

Huobi also supports the changes to Bitcoin Cash, but puts a disclaimer in its support: “Due to the many uncertainties surrounding the current fork, if one of the two parties decides to abandon the fork, Huobi will select the true successor to Bitcoin Cash based on community opinion.”

OKEx announced that after the BCH fork is completed, it will select a chain with a higher price as the contract underlying asset and add it to the BCH contract index components, while Bithumb Global will select the solution that will receive more support from the community and name it "BCH".

However, the exchange Kraken said that it will support BCHN regardless of the fork result. On its platform, BCHN will be called BCH, and only when BCHA's computing power accounts for 10% or more of the BCH network, the platform will support BCHA services, and the token code will use "BAB".

The parent company of hardware wallet Trezor, SatoshiLabs, announced that SatoshiLabs will not participate in the fork until the community makes a decision. If users wish to participate in the fork, they should transfer their BCH balance to another wallet that supports the fork to ensure that they receive any tokens generated by the fork.

3 changes after upgrading

The upgrade mainly includes three changes. According to the Bitcoin Cash website, the network upgrade will make changes to the difficulty adjustment algorithm (DAA), Coinbase rule, and automatic replay protection.

First of all, no matter whether the BCHN version or the ABC version is finally chosen, the original DAA will be replaced. The new version will use the ASERT algorithm. The upgrade page on GitHub shows that this alternative algorithm will eliminate the mining difficulty and hash rate changes of Bitcoin Cash.

In addition, the alternative algorithm ensures that stable miners and temporary miners who transfer between different blockchains have equal mining benefits. This update also keeps the interval between the creation of new blocks as close as possible to 10 minutes. Finally, the ASERT algorithm will also strive to improve the average transaction confirmation time and provide a more stable transaction operation experience.

The second part (only applicable to the upgraded version of ABC) is the Coinbase rule, which is also the origin of this dispute (it has nothing to do with exchanges, and the coinbase here refers to the specific part of the newly mined block). It requires that 8% of all block rewards be sent to a specific Bitcoin Cash address, which is controlled by the ABC development team.

Finally, Bitcoin Cash will have replay protection after the upgrade. This is intended to decouple all non-upgraded full validation nodes from the main network after the next round of upgrades on May 15, 2021.

Bitcoin ABC, the core development team of BCH, said that it will continue to maintain BCH nodes after the fork. Bitcoin ABC said that after the fork, it will support both BCHN and BCHA chains. If an enterprise wants to support the chain that is funded by block rewards for its own network development, that is, the BCHA chain, it should run Bitcoin ABC 0.22.6 (BCHA network), or any previous 0.22.x version; if an enterprise wants to support the chain that is funded by donations for its own network development, that is, BCHN, it should run the BCHN version: Bitcoin ABC 0.22.6 (BCHN network).

Further reading:

https://decrypt.co/47667/bitcoin-cash-hard-fork-what-you-need-to-know