Four men who determine the fork and future of BCH: Roger Jiang Zhuoer Yang Haipo Wu Jihan

On November 15, BCH will fork again. With the statements of Binance and Coinbase, BCHN has basically overthrown the original development team ABC. In summary, ABC 's forced promotion of IFP without consensus is the direct cause of this fork. The core leader of the community , Roger Ver ,'s opposition to ABC and his clear support for BCHN are the root of the success of this fork.

Causes of forking

The fork was caused by different opinions on IFP. The original development team ABC insisted on joining this plan, and part of the mining income of miners would be directly given to developers as development fees. This plan was opposed by some community members, and a new development team called BCHN was formed.

The cryptocurrency community seems to be composed of individuals, but in fact, most of them are influenced by core evangelists. Later, because the core figures of the BCH community, such as Roger and Jiang Zhuoer, successively stood on the opposite side of BCHABC and clearly expressed their support for BCHN, the Chinese and foreign communities began to turn against BCH as a whole. The other two core figures, Wu Jihan, did not express their views, and Yang Haipo was neutral.

Roger Ver was called Bitcoin Jesus because of his early fanatical preaching of Bitcoin, and later he also fanatically turned to preaching BCH; Jiang Zhuoer is the founder of Litecoin Mining Pool and the first person to popularize Bitcoin in China; Yang Haipo is the founder of Coinex Exchange and Viabtc Mining Pool; Wu Jihan is the founder of Bitmain.

The embarrassing thing is that IFP was proposed by Jiang Zhuoer, and four supporters were signed in the plan: Jiang Zhuoer-BTC.TOP, Wu Jihan-Antpool, BTC.com, Yang Haibo-ViaBTC, Roger Ver-Bitcoin.com. Roger was the first to express his opposition under the pressure of the Western community, and even said that he did not agree with the agreement. Jiang Zhuoer lost his patience in constantly revising the proposal and communicating with the ABC team, saying that the other party was "unable to communicate" and turned to support BCHN.

Amaury, the leader of the ABC development team, has been criticized for forcing the IFP forward despite community opinions, emphasizing that donation addresses are managed by individuals, and having an enemy-me mentality toward other development teams. After several members who once worked with him left, they turned against him and became firm critics and attackers of him. The lack of a voice on Amaury's side led to one-sided public opinion, but public opinion was not as important as the opposition of core supporters.

The result of the fork

On November 3, Binance released an announcement. According to Coin Dance data, as of 08:00 am on November 2, 2020 (Hong Kong time), the block node distribution in the last 7 days was 71.9% for BCHN and 0.8% for BCHA. The BCHN solution is currently far ahead of the BCHA solution. Therefore, if a forked coin is generated after a hard fork, Binance will choose the BCHN node solution by default. Binance's clear statement shows that BCH will most likely be replaced by BCHN in the future. On November 5, Coinbase also stated that it would adopt the BCHN node, and the outcome is no longer in suspense.

Unlike the previous two forks where both sides had strong strength, this time ABC became the party abandoned by the community and core supporters. It is expected that the overall BCH will smoothly transition to the BCHN management plan. BCHA will continue to exist, but because there is no consensus support, it will be sold in large quantities after stabilization. Unless it is supported by a large external consortium or fund, it will gradually disappear from the public eye. At present, there is no sign of this "white knight" appearing.

The future of forking

There are two concerns about the future of this BCH fork.

First, although the ABC team has not achieved many highlights in the past few years, its basic technical strength is trustworthy. The BCHN team has not yet proven itself in terms of project leadership, and only emphasized fixing several bugs in ABC. On the other hand, BCH is affected by the model and does not seem to require a lot of development.

Second, will BCH be infected with the "fork gene" and even fork endlessly in the future? In essence, the four core supporters of BCH, Roger, Wu Jihan, Jiang Zhuoer, and Yang Haipo, have relatively consistent ideas. What's worse is that an uncontrolled developer appeared and the IFP was hastily proposed before consensus was reached, which led to today's outcome. After learning from the lesson, this accidental incident should not happen again.

Although it is generally believed that exchanges have replaced mining pools as the decision makers in forks, it can be seen that the attitude of opinion leaders in the community is still a decisive factor in a project. In the early days of Bitmain, China provided more support; later, due to internal disputes within Bitmain, support for BCH was criticized. Roger's attitude and support are more dominant in the community.

Reflections on the fork

In cryptocurrencies, developers often have supreme power. From the earliest Satoshi Nakamoto, to the handover to Bitcoin Core, to mainstream products such as Ethereum, Polkadot, Filecoin, and even BSV and Tron, developers and community leaders are often one and the same, so their opinions are relatively unified . BCH is special. Although community leaders can fund developers, they do not have management power.

Although Jiang Zhuoer said that the BCH fork solved a problem (which BTC was unable to solve): the development team and domain name are not BCH, the community is BCH. Even if you are the main development team, you cannot violate the community consensus, otherwise you will be abandoned by the community.

But if every rebellion against developers requires a fork to resolve, then is the cost too high? The leader of BCHN is anonymous. If they abandon BCH in the future or stand against the community again, will another fork be needed?

(This article was contributed by Zhuang Zhong from BTC.com, Wang Hongli from Matrixport, and Cindy Feng. The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of Wu Shuo Blockchain. Click to read the original article and watch the BTC.com fork countdown page .)