A chart to understand the Bitcoin world: in-depth comparison of BTC and 6 forked coins

Since Bitcoin Cash (BCH) started on August 1 last year, Bitcoin (BTC) hard forks have become unstoppable. So far, there are as many as 6 types of hard forks, including those that have been successfully forked, those that are about to be forked, and those that have failed. The names alone are easy to confuse people.

The table above summarizes the detailed specifications of BTC and six forked coins: BCH, BTG, B2X, BCD, SBTC, BCHC, and also includes BTX. It should be noted that BTX has a certain relationship with BTC, but it is not generated by BTC fork. The following is an interpretation of each coin:

BTC (Bitcoin)

BTC is the well-known Bitcoin, which is synonymous with digital currency. It was created by the legendary figure Satoshi Nakamoto and has been running stably for more than 8 years. Its price has increased by 2.5 million times. It is currently the digital currency with the highest value and influence. Many of its stories will not be told anymore.

BTC's position as the leader of digital currencies is unshakable, with a market value of more than $1,200 billion, accounting for more than half of the total market value of all digital currencies. The price of BTC is still rising, and it is optimistically estimated that the price of BTC will soar to more than $10,000 next year.

From a technical perspective, BTC has no advantages over other digital currencies. The block size is only 1M, transaction delays occur, and transaction fees are getting higher and higher. Although the upgraded SegWit (Segregated Witness) can alleviate these problems to a certain extent, it still cannot meet the growing transaction needs. Therefore, many developers and supporters are discussing the issue of capacity expansion, which has spawned Bitcoin Cash (BCH) and a series of hard fork events.

Bitcoin Core is the only development team of BTC, which is composed of a group of senior digital currency developers. Based on their belief, they cannot accept major changes to Bitcoin. The expansion including SegWit2x has not been carried out smoothly.

BCH (Bitcoin Cash)

BCH is short for Bitcoin Cash, and its Chinese name is Bitcoin Cash. In addition, BCC is the early name of BCH, which is now deprecated. BCH forked on August 1, 2017, when Bitcoin height was 478559, creating a precedent for Bitcoin forks. As listed in this article, Bitcoin forks have become increasingly common after BCH.

BCH is a scaling solution for BTC, using 8M blocks and not supporting SegWit, because the development team believes that with such a large block size, SegWit has become irrelevant. BCH learned from the lessons of the Ethereum fork last year and added two-way replay protection, so there was no chaos such as asset loss after the fork. Later, other forked coins also followed suit and generally added replay protection.

BCH's mining resistance algorithm and mining machines are the same as BTC. Some mining pools have also added a BTC/BCH automatic switching function, which can automatically switch miners to higher-yield currencies. Initially, BCH used the emergency difficulty adjustment mechanism (EDA), but later found that EDA was not stable enough, and sometimes the mining difficulty was more than 3 times that of BTC. Therefore, BCH implemented a hard fork upgrade on November 13, and has now added the DAA difficulty adjustment mechanism.

From the current situation, BCH is the most successful of several Bitcoin forks, and its influence is constantly expanding. It has been supported by many exchanges and wallets, and even some big names in the cryptocurrency circle believe that BCH is the real Bitcoin. On November 12, the price of BCH soared wildly, reaching a historical high of $2,500, and its market value once reached more than $30 billion, briefly surpassing Ethereum to become the second largest digital currency. But then the price of BCH fell sharply and is currently in a state of ups and downs.

BCH is jointly developed and maintained by multiple teams including BitcoinABC, Bitcoin Unlimited, and BitcoinXT, so the power is not concentrated in the hands of one party.

BTG (Bitcoin Gold)

BTG is the abbreviation of Bitcoin Gold, and its Chinese name is Bitcoin Gold. The Bitcoin Gold development team is led by Liao Xiang, CEO of Hong Kong mining company LightningASIC. BTG forked from Bitcoin at height 491407, but after the fork on October 25, the BTG network was not completed, so it was not officially launched until the early morning of November 13, Beijing time.

Compared with other forked coins, BTG did not expand the capacity of BTC, and still uses the 1M block + SegWit setting. The main change is the mining algorithm. In order to prevent the problem of excessive concentration of computing power caused by ASIC dedicated mining machines, it has been restricted and switched to GPU mining, and uses the emergency difficulty adjustment mechanism (EDA). In general, BTG mainly wants to solve the problem of excessive concentration of BTC mining computing power and difficulty adjustment mechanism.

After the fork, BTG futures were launched on many exchanges, and the futures price reached around $500 on November 11. However, after BTG was officially launched, the attention dropped sharply. A large number of Bitcoin holders sold BTG candies after receiving them, causing the price of BTG to fall rapidly. At the time of writing, the price of BTG was below $200, and the prospects were not optimistic.

BCD (Bitcoin Diamond)

BCD is the abbreviation of Bitcoin Diamond, and its Chinese name is Bitcoin Diamond. It was jointly developed by Evey and the 007 team and operated by the Bitcoin Diamond Foundation. BCD was first announced after the failure of the SegWit2x fork, and it was forked at the Bitcoin block height of 495866, which is expected to be carried out at the end of November. BCD uses 8M large blocks, supports SegWit, has replay protection, and uses a new work verification algorithm to create blocks. Compared with BTC, it has transfer privacy protection function, and the transaction amount can also be encrypted.

The total issuance of Bitcoin Diamonds is 210 million, which is exactly 10 times that of Bitcoin. Among them, 170 million Bitcoin Diamonds are provided to Bitcoin holders, and the distribution and exchange ratio is 1BTC: 10BCD. The remaining 40 million Bitcoin Cash will be automatically transferred to the community reward pool as mining rewards.

On November 16, exchanges Okex.com and Btcbox.co.jp announced their support for BCD. In addition, exchanges such as Exx.com, Aex.com, Cex.com, Kex.com, Coinbene.com and Rightbtc.com also stated that they would list BCD.

Since BCD has not yet forked, there is not much discussion for the time being. Golden Finance will continue to track and report on the developments of BCD.

B2X

B2X is a new currency that was originally scheduled to be generated by the SegWit2x fork on November 16 (today), but the SegWit2x plan was canceled not long ago, and B2X was also aborted. However, B2X did not end because the SegWit2x program already exists. If people activate it, Bitcoin will still fork and generate new coins.

This morning, the Weibo account Bitcoin2x posted a message saying that they have formed the BitcoinX team, taken over SegWit2x and renamed it the BitcoinX project, and will fork at Bitcoin height 494784 as originally planned. Today, November 16th is called "Bitcoin 2X Independence Day" by them.

Previously, B2X futures have been listed on some exchanges, and the trading volume has exceeded 100,000 coins. If the SegWit2x fork is canceled, these transactions will be wasted and investors will suffer huge losses. Therefore, the BitcoinX team believes that the 26 members who supported the SegWit2x plan and signed the New York Agreement have betrayed B2X investors, and BitcoinX has reason to continue B2X and safeguard the interests of B2X investors.

The BitcoinX team has made some changes to the original SegWit2x, modifying the mining algorithm from ASIC mining to GPU mining. The block size is still 2M, SegWit is supported, and two-way replay protection is added. Therefore, this time B2X is not trying to compete with BTC for who is the orthodox, but to make B2X independent.

In terms of distribution, miners donate 200,000 B2X tokens to the operation team, of which 100,000 will be directly circulated, and the remaining 100,000 B2X will be locked for 3 years and distributed when the next reward is halved.

SBTC (Super Bitcoin)

SBTC, Super Bitcoin, is a forked coin that has emerged in recent days. The development team is Super Bitcoin, and the leader of the team is the famous "China's richest Bitcoiner" Li Xiaolai.

SBTC is a new Bitcoin fork. According to the Super Bitcoin team, SBTC will conduct a hard fork test on December 17, 2017. The block size of SBTC is 8MB, and the total issuance is 21.21 million. The extra 210,000 coins are pre-mined coins. The most controversial issue in the industry is that these extra 210,000 coins mined out of thin air may become a tool for some people to make huge profits.

In addition, according to the team, SBTC will integrate smart contracts, lightning networks, zero-knowledge proofs, and remove dynamic checkpoint protection. These features were not available during the December 17 fork test and will be added in 2018.

Judging from the current situation, although Super Bitcoin has provided some very superior technical features, whether it can be realized is another matter. At the same time, some basic features of SBTC are not provided, and many details are worth discussing. It is still difficult to convince players and investors in the currency circle.

BCHC

BCHC, whose full name is Bitcoin Clashic, is temporarily transliterated as "Bitcoin Clashic" in Chinese. It has very low popularity and support rate and is basically dead.

BCHC was created through a malicious hard fork when Bitcoin Cash forked on August 1, 2017. BCHC has its own official website, claiming that it has been in existence since August 1, but the website content is almost completely copied from the BCH official website. Its features are almost the same as BCH, and it also promises that BCHC is very reliable, transactions only take a few seconds, there is no transaction congestion, and the technology is powerful, etc. However, the key wallet and exchange support content is all empty, which can be considered a copycat version of BCH. Currently, there are basically no wallets and traders supporting BCHC.

Bitcoin Clashic is a typical negative example of a hard fork, which shows that it is easy to execute a fork, but if it is not recognized by the community, miners, and investors, even if the hard fork is activated, it will eventually die.

BTX

According to the Bitcoin X team, BTX is also one of the names of the B2X coin introduced above. However, we generally agree that the new coin generated by the SegWit2x fork is named B2X. Therefore, the BTX introduced below is another digital currency.

Strictly speaking, BTX is not a fork of Bitcoin, but a brand new digital currency built using Bitcoin technology. The development team is Bitcore, and the first BTX was born on April 24, 2017.

The total issuance of BTX is 21 million, the block size reaches 20M, and it supports SegWit. BTX uses the Timetravel 10 algorithm, the Diff64_15 difficulty adjustment mechanism, uses GPU mining, and can generate a block every 2.5 minutes.

The distribution method of BTX is quite special. In addition to mining, there are two other ways to obtain BTX: airdrop and snapshot claim. The Bitcore team will airdrop 3% of BTX as a reward every week. In addition, Bitcoin holders can also claim BTX rewards by taking photos of the Bitcoin network on a specific date.

According to the official website, BTX started trading on BitZ.com in November 2017, and the transaction volume has reached 750,000 US dollars. However, when the website address BitZ.com was opened, it was empty and the domain name was being sold.

Bitcoin will eventually return to rationality after the fork craze

This concludes the comparison and introduction of the six forked coins of Bitcoin. In summary, only BCH and BTG have completed the fork and successfully launched, while BCHC has forked but can be considered a failed project. B2X, BCD and SBTC will complete the fork in the remaining month of this year.

Judging from the results, it is not the case that the coin with better technical performance will definitely become mainstream. The key still lies in the support and popularity. This is the same as the products in many other industries. If it can be operated and hyped, it will be closer to success. Background and supporters are very important.

Although BCH has only been around for a few months, it has already gained fairly wide recognition, and its overall price has been rising continuously, indicating that it is possible to create a mainstream digital currency through a hard fork.

Judging from the low attention paid to BTG and BCD, as well as the not-so-optimistic price situation, the market does not need so many BTC forks. Hard forks may become more frequent next year, and more new currencies will be created, but few of them will be able to cause a stir and will quickly die in silence. On the one hand, the market size of digital currencies is not that large to support so many currencies; on the other hand, not all digital currencies are valuable, and miners and investors will only choose the digital currencies with the best returns. Therefore, after experiencing the Bitcoin fork craze, digital currencies will eventually return to rationality.