Bitcoin cliff BCH hard fork who is the final winner

In addition to development concepts and beliefs, hard forks are also driven entirely by interests.

A friend told me a few days ago that he hoped that Bitmain and the "fake Satoshi Nakamoto" would sell their Bitcoins and exchange them for BCH because of the BCH hard fork battle, so that he could buy cheap Bitcoin.

Just as he wished, after early this morning, Bitcoin experienced a cliff-like decline, falling from $6,100 to $5,300 in 4 hours, and then rebounded to $5,700.

But is this decline really due to both parties dumping their stocks as he thought? We don’t know. But at least there is a certain relationship. Therefore, we still need to pay more attention to the BCH hard fork.

In the previous article "A 30% increase in 5 days, what happened to BCH?", it was mentioned that a "fake Satoshi Nakamoto" in Australia proposed a competing plan, intending to hard fork a new chain from the current BCH main chain.

01: Hard fork controversy, who is right and who is wrong

According to Wikipedia, this person is named Craig Steven Wright, an Australian computer scientist and businessman. He claims to be Satoshi Nakamoto, the inventor of Bitcoin. However, an investigation by Wired magazine found that this was an elaborate scam designed by him.

Vitalik called him a liar, Jihan Wu called him the "fake Satoshi Nakamoto", and some people called him "Australian Satoshi Nakamoto", or Craig Wright for short.

The focus of the disagreement between the two parties is whether BCH should maintain its capacity and increase operation codes to develop into a basic public chain to expand application scenarios, or return to Bitcoin's original transfer transactions.

The bitcoin SV community camp led by Craig Wright hopes that BCH will remain as described in Satoshi Nakamoto's paper, with strict restrictions on operation codes, focusing on the transfer transaction itself, and hopes to eventually expand the block size to 128MB.

Bitcoin ABC, led by Wu Jihan, believes that BCH should be developed towards the direction of infrastructure public chain while maintaining the block size at 32MB. In this way, BCH can open up more application scenarios like Ethereum.

The dispute between the two became increasingly intense. In an interview, Craig Wright once said that he was very rich and wanted to use his money to destroy Bitmain.

02: Comparison of computing power between the ABC camp and the SV camp

Bitcoin's POW proof-of-work mechanism perfectly exploits human greed. Countless mining machines mine Bitcoin day and night while protecting the Bitcoin network.

Whoever has a mining machine with greater computing power has a greater chance of mining Bitcoin.

Because BCH is a hard fork from Bitcoin and uses the POW mechanism, it also requires mining machines to provide computing power to maintain the entire BCH network.

Although Bitmain is a mining machine manufacturer, it is actually also a mining pool giant. According to the latest data from CoinDance, the three major mining pools directly related to Bitmain include BTC.COM accounting for 13%, AntPool accounting for 13%, and ViaBTC accounting for 6%, totaling about 32%.

BTC.TOP, a mining pool with an ambiguous relationship with Bitmain, accounts for 10%, and the two together account for 42%. These computing powers can be switched to the BCH network to mine BCH at any time.

In the BCH network, these four major mining pools together have a total of 10% of the computing power, and the combined computing power of the Bitcoin network is 52%.

Bitcoin mining pool computing power distribution

According to the latest data from CoinDance, the mining pools supporting SV account for 45% of Coingeek, svpool accounts for 11%, and BMG accounts for 10%, totaling 66%.

BCH mining pool computing power distribution

Compared with 52% and 66%, Bitmain is slightly weaker than the other.

The leaders of both camps

Analysts say that the biggest difference between the SV camp and Bitmain in terms of computing power is that its computing power is its own, while Bitmain's mining pool is mainly based on the computing power of its customers.

The mining pool's computing power is not equal to its own computing power, but also includes the computing power of the mining machines hosted by miners. Once miners are treated unfairly, they will switch mining pools.

To give an example, the current situation between Bitmain and the SV camp is like a money-burning war among domestic Internet companies, except that this time they are burning money for mining and competing for more computing power.

03: The final winner may be the mining pool boss

During the last hard fork, the BCH team supported by Bitmain took the initiative to add “replay protection” to the BCH network, protecting the interests of both BCH and Bitcoin investors.

This time, the SV camp has no intention of adding "replay protection" and does not seem to care whether it will cause trouble to transactions. Instead, it is going all out to compete in computing power, which may cause serious losses to ordinary investors.

On the other hand, the Trustnodes website reported that just before this, BCHSV and BCHABC had already launched their respective futures products in advance.

Today BCHSV futures price exceeds BCHABC

The highest point of BCHSV futures is $600, and the highest point of BCHABC futures is $4,200. If BCHSV enters the market at this price, its market value may reach $2.4 billion, making it one of the top ten cryptocurrencies.

Xiao Lei, a digital currency analyst and director of the 500 Gold Research Institute, said that in addition to issues of development concepts and beliefs, the hard fork of digital currency is also completely driven by interests.

Both parties hope that BCH will improve in the direction that is easiest for them to promote and develop. The fork is actually to defend their own voice in the entire system and to gain corresponding benefits.

The winning party prevents the ecological split and makes the protocol version it supports inherit the interests of the entire network economic ecology. No wonder some people say that this fork is a war launched by a group of mining pool bosses to maximize the interests of the entire community for their own profit distribution.