BCH has forked. Here’s a look at the choices of 24 exchanges

On November 13, 2017, BCH officially forked from BTC due to consensus differences, and planned to have a hard fork upgrade every six months thereafter.

On May 17, 2018, BCH completed its first hard fork upgrade, upgrading the basic block size from 8MB to 32MB. The new consensus rules officially took effect at block height 530356.

According to the information on the Bitcoincash.org website, the BCH network will undergo a second hard fork protocol upgrade at UNIX timestamp 1542300000 (Beijing time November 16, 2018 0:40). Unlike the first time, this protocol upgrade has two incompatible protocol versions: Bitcoin ABC 0.18.2 and Bitcoin SV. Supporters of the two versions did not give in, and various big Vs spoke out to take sides. All parties in the industry also paid close attention, and the computing power war was inevitable. At present, this hard fork has ended, and the BCH network has officially been divided into two, but the war is not over yet. Should we maintain the status quo or launch another computing power attack?

1

This computing power war, which has been in the works for several months, officially kicked off last night.

SV is making efforts, and the war may have already begun

At 21:37 on the 15th, the mining war may have begun. Coin Dance data showed that Coingeek, which supports SV, continuously mined BCH blocks with block heights from 556746 to 556750.

The fork is about to start, and SV has the upper hand in computing power

At 0:35 on the 16th, with 5 minutes left before the fork, bitcoin.com, the supporter of ABC, mined a block with a height of 556758. However, in terms of real-time computing power comparison, the SV camp still has a greater advantage.

At 0:40, the BCH network upgrade was not completed. Six more BCH blocks needed to be mined before the BCH network upgrade could go online. Therefore, the BCH official fork was delayed for more than an hour.

During the hard fork process, as of 1:10, the Coingeek and SVPool mining pools supporting the SV camp produced the first three blocks in succession.

ABC’s computing power surges and begins to take the lead

At 1:18, according to the real-time data of mining pool computing power, the BCH computing power of the Bitcoin.com mining pool of the ABC camp increased by 1593.09% in the past 24 hours to 4081.03PH/S, surpassing the Coingeek mining pool of the Craig Wright camp and ranking first. The BTC computing power of the Bitcoin.com mining pool decreased by 48.56% in the past 24 hours to 235.96PH/S.

Due to a sudden increase in computing power, the Bitcoin.com mining pool mined the fourth block at 1:21. After that, the ABC camp continued to work hard, and the ViaBTC mining pool mined the fifth block at 1:40.

At 1:50, CSW tweeted to accuse the ABC camp of arbitrarily switching and calling on user computing power.

ABC switches back computing power, fork completed

At 1:54, Bitcoin.com's computing power switched back to BTC, and the computing power dropped to 216.65PH/s, and Coingeek's computing power returned to the first place.

At around 1:56, the last public block before the official fork was mined by SVPool, which supports SV. At this time, the block height was 556766.

Since then, this round of BCH hard fork has been officially completed, and the BCH ABC chain and BCH SV began to part ways.

At 2:05, the first block after the fork was mined by Bitcom.com. This block adopted the new consensus mechanism of Bitcoin ABC and became incompatible with Bitcoin SV.

Afterwards, Wu Jihan tweeted: "Congratulations! There will be no more troublemakers in the BCH community after this new block!" And CSW said on his social media, "The game has begun."

ABC and SV independently produced blocks

At 2:24, the first block of SV was mined by Mempool, with a block height of 556767. Since then, both forked chains have completed independent block production.

As of press time, ABC's block production speed is far ahead of SV, with 42 more blocks.

2

Exchanges have different attitudes towards this fork. 01 Finance·Binary has counted the attitudes and related announcements of the top exchanges in terms of trading volume on coinmarketcap towards this fork, and divided these exchanges into four types.

Type A Exchange

Type A exchanges clearly support either Bitcoin ABC or Bitcoin SV, and their stance is clear. In the announcement, they not only announced the suspension time of deposits and withdrawals, snapshot time, risk warnings and other factors, but also made clear statements on the support side. Among them, the old exchange Bitstamp announced in an announcement yesterday that during the fork, it only supports Bitcoin ABC, but also left room for maneuver, saying that it will observe the situation and make further decisions after the complete fork is completed.

Source: 01 Finance·Binary compiled based on coinmarketcap data

Type B Exchange

Type B exchanges account for the majority, and they do not "take sides" and maintain a neutral attitude. In the announcement, the general statement of this type of exchange is "If Bitcoin SV and Bitcoin ABC fork successfully, and both parties operate independently and stably, they will distribute candies to users at a 1:1 ratio based on snapshot data; and after the main network is stable, BCH (ABC) or BCH (SV) deposits and withdrawals will be opened at an appropriate time." They all announced the suspension of deposits and withdrawals and snapshot times to protect the safety of users' funds. However, among Type B exchanges, HitBTC did not take a snapshot, and stated in the announcement on November 10 that trading can start as soon as the fork occurs.

Source: 01 Finance·Binary compiled based on coinmarketcap data

Type C Exchange

In the announcements before and after the BCH fork, Type C exchanges did not clearly state which side they would support in the future, BCH ABC or BCH SV. Moreover, this type of exchange took a wait-and-see attitude during the entire fork process. Their announcements often only mentioned the snapshot time, the suspension time of deposits and withdrawals, risk warnings, and a bystander position of paying attention to the development of the situation. Type C exchanges can announce deposits, withdrawals, and trading of the two currencies after the chain fork becomes stable, so they naturally have a tendency to transform into other types of exchanges.

Source: 01 Finance·Binary compiled based on coinmarketcap data

D-type Exchange

In their announcements before and after the BCH fork, Type D exchanges often clearly support the deposit, withdrawal and trading of a certain coin (mostly ABC), but will also support the trading of two coins after the chain fork becomes stable (the other coin will be distributed in the form of candy or only provide trading pairs). Therefore, Type D exchanges did not go to extremes and showed strategic flexibility throughout the BCH fork.

Source: 01 Finance·Binary compiled based on coinmarketcap data

3

What happens when investors are faced with four different types of exchanges?

First of all, it should be made clear that under normal circumstances, hard forks will not affect investors' BCH. Although prices may fluctuate greatly, the security of BCH stored in wallets or exchanges is sufficiently guaranteed.

Secondly, since the BCH network is currently divided into two, generating two chains and two currencies, the previously owned BCH will be "cloned" into two new currencies of equal value, and investors will have the opportunity to get "candy".

In addition, if investors want to trade BCH between different exchanges after the fork, they need to confirm the types of forked coins supported by each exchange, otherwise the transaction will not be completed. It is worth noting that before the fork, both Bitcoin ABC and Bitcoin SV chains stated that they would not do "replay protection", while some exchanges will set up "replay protection" on their own, which investors can pay attention to.

Finally, although the fork has been completed, it has not yet been successful. According to the previous Huobi Global announcement, the hard fork must meet the following two conditions for success:

1. Strict two-way replay attack protection;

2. Each of them runs independently and stably, and each of them produces blocks independently and stably. Judging from the current situation, this fork event will not end here, and the computing power war may continue.

Therefore, it is safer for investors to operate in the market after the fork is completely successful or one of the chains is attacked and reduced to zero. Of course, if a chain is attacked and reduced to zero, the so-called "candy" will of course be gone with the wind.