The short history of wealth explosion in the cryptocurrency circle is also a repeated history of the evolution of human nature. In the early accumulation of wealth, accompanied by the myth of thousands of times of returns, it seems that the omnipotent light of blockchain shines on all living beings. Only recently, the desire to obtain wealth has been trapped in the cage of rationality. Most investors have fallen back to their original class, unable to turn over and fall asleep, and the remaining investors stick to the truth and wait for the consensus value to cash out.

The religious origins of blockchain

After the financial crisis in 2008, governments around the world were once in a credit crisis. A mysterious man who called himself Satoshi Nakamoto threw the first Bible of blockchain cryptography, the Bitcoin White Paper, to the pagans of the old world. The blockchain religion was born and became a school of its own, attracting many followers. Ten years later, preachers gathered, and some devout people even prayed from dusk to three in the morning.

Satoshi Nakamoto said that there should be Bitcoin, and so Bitcoin came into being. Then he left a sentence in the Genesis Block that can never be modified:

The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks

It was at that time that the British Chancellor of the Exchequer, Darling, was forced to consider a second attempt to relieve the banking crisis.

The title of the Times front-page article not only explains the time when the block was created, but also sneers at the old fragile banking system. The vision of Bitcoin is to establish a peer-to-peer cash transaction system, which disintegrates the existence of third-party credit intermediaries through decentralization and ensures the security and freedom of property.

Initially, this was no different from the tulip bubble in the eyes of conservative classicists. At the same time, it also aroused the vigilance of interest mouthpieces. The argument of Bitcoin scam was heard endlessly. A folk professor once said that he would not accept Bitcoin even if it was given to me. But it remained intact for hundreds of times. The accelerated rise of Bitcoin after each adjustment gave the reformists hope for a complete reshuffle. More and more capital and technology are going all in on blockchain, fearing that they will be left behind by the times.

The Dilemma of Bitcoin

"In God We Trust" is printed on the US dollar, and the blockchain is stamped with a timestamp. As the pioneer, Bitcoin has been running smoothly for 9 years, and the total fixed issuance will reach 21 million by 2140. The current circulation volume is about 16.95 million, which has been widely used and recognized around the world, and can be called a global currency.

But the consensus is still wavering. Since the Bitcoin network was initially designed with a 1M block size limit, it can only support 7 transactions per second, which is far from enough to handle the current huge transaction volume. Network congestion has led to longer transaction confirmation times and higher transaction fees. Bitcoin has also become unreliable, and some users have not been able to get their transactions confirmed even after waiting for several days.

On the other hand, the market price of Bitcoin is rising, but its growth and practicality as a currency are stagnant. Many users, merchants, and even investors have abandoned Bitcoin and started looking for new alternatives, which has caused Bitcoin's share of the total digital currency market value to continue to decline. Bitcoin's payment function has been gradually weakened, and it has slowly transitioned to a function similar to gold, such as value preservation and value storage.

Survival of the fittest

The evolution of history is always gradual, and when the time comes, a successor will inevitably be chosen. Although community members realized the problem of capacity expansion four years ago, and Satoshi Nakamoto also proposed the idea of ​​capacity expansion eight years ago, due to different visions, interest groups representing various parties proposed their own capacity expansion plans.

Initially, the simple block expansion plan was abandoned by the majority of community members, who turned to the Segwit2x plan reached by the New York Consensus. However, Segregated Witness (SegWit) itself is very controversial. Although the upgraded SegWit (Segregated Witness) can alleviate the existing problems to a certain extent, it still cannot meet the growing transaction needs. From the initiation of the vote to the proposal of the Segwit2x plan, the voting rate of miners was only about 40%. The expiration date of the vote is November.

Seeing that failure was imminent, the extremists in the Core development team began to launch a new proposal BIP148 - UASF (User Activated Soft Fork). This plan is to split Bitcoin in the form of a soft fork. Because soft forks have the power to reorganize the original chain, the entire community is also very worried about this.

In this situation, determined expansionists began to look for new ways out, using a simple and clean way to expand the block size. At a critical moment, a developer proposed the Bitcoin abc project to implement UAHF (user activated hard fork), which gave many voters hope of success. The dramatic thing is that the UASF (user activated soft fork) proposed by Core did not actually produce a fork in the end because of its small computing power and compatibility with SegWit, but instead promoted UAHF (user activated hard fork).

Bitcoin Cash (BCH) is the result of UAHF, an emergency plan proposed for UASF. The token of Bitcoin abc is called Bitcoin Cash, which was called BCC in the early days and later changed to BCH.

History moves forward and is never affected by individual will. The emergence of Bitcoin Cash is the result of four years of discussion in the Bitcoin community around capacity expansion and the ease of use of Bitcoin. Such a historical background cannot be manipulated.

What makes Bitcoin Cash unique

Most of the forked schools have been lost in the long river of history. There are countless forked coins, and most of them are harvested by IQ. The culmination of all is Bitcoin Cash (BCH). Bitcoin Cash (BCH) inherits the common user base of BTC, and with its greater emphasis on user experience, low handling fees, and fast transactions, it has quickly become the fourth in the world.

The difference between BTC and BCH is that BTC's block size is 1M, supports Segwit and Lightning Network, has high transfer fees, and slow transaction confirmation; BCH's block size is increased to 8M, does not support Segwit and Lightning Network, has low transfer fees, and fast transaction confirmation. BCH's transfer fee is about 1/10 of BTC's.

The difference between Bitcoin Cash (BCH) and other forked coins including BTG, SBTC, UB, etc. is that other forked coins take snapshots at block heights, and then copy the account information on the snapshot to create a new ledger, the information of which can be modified.

Bitcoin Cash (BCH) completely inherits all the blocks of Bitcoin (BTC). It does not copy and replicate a new ledger, but uses the Bitcoin ledger at height 478558 and all previous heights. The two sets of ledgers of BCH and BTC are exactly the same at height 478558 and before, without any changes. This is equivalent to making a complete system backup for BTC, preserving the revolutionary fire for Satoshi Nakamoto's thought.

New Features for Bitcoin Cash

• On-chain Scaling - Bitcoin Cash follows Satoshi's roadmap to achieve global adoption through on-chain scaling. As a first step, the block size limit has been made adjustable, increasing to 8MB by default. Research is ongoing to allow for significantly higher block sizes in the future.
  

  
  

• New Transaction Signatures - The new signature hash (SigHash) type provides replay attack protection, improves hardware wallet security, and solves the quadratic hashing problem.

  
  

• New Difficulty Adjustment Algorithm (DAA) - Responsive Proof of Work (PoW) difficulty adjustment allows miners to migrate from the old Bitcoin chain to the new chain at their will, while providing protection against excessive fluctuations in computing power.

  
  

• Decentralized development - With software implementations from multiple independent development teams, the future is secure. Bitcoin Cash is resilient to political and social attacks on protocol development, and no single team or project is in control. The bitcoin-ml mailing list is a good platform for cross-development collaboration to implement protocol changes.

Bitcoin Cash Disadvantages

The disadvantage of Bitcoin Cash (BCH) is that the 8M expansion has not achieved a qualitative change, unlike the BTC Lightning Network which can theoretically achieve a qualitative leap. Another disadvantage is that large blocks on the chain may not be confirmed in time, but the development of Bitcoin Cash is working hard to improve the security of zero confirmation.

The road to rebuilding consensus

Bitcoin Cash (BCH) has been developing rapidly since 2017, with the support of major miners, exchanges, and some large companies in payment and settlement. In addition, Bitcoin Cash (BCH) pays more attention to user experience, and its low fees and fast speed have made it gradually evolve into a payment currency.

At the beginning of its launch, it received support from many well-known exchanges. Currently, 44 exchanges have launched BCH, 28 wallets support BCH, 18 services support it, and 13 projects support BCH payments. The circulating market value has reached 74 billion, ranking fourth in the global digital currency, and the current expansion is still continuing.

In the long run, the cost of miners can be regarded as the fundamentals. Compared with any forked coin, Bitcoin Cash (BCH) , as a currency with the most miners' support, is still undervalued at present. The cryptocurrency market is still a niche market. If one day in the future, the number of transactions, number of users, and total market value of Bitcoin Cash (BCH) exceed Bitcoin, then the consensus will be updated and iterated.

Conclusion

Digital currency is still in its infancy, but people who have entered have been washed away in waves. There is a verse in the Bible: "Those who sow in tears will reap in joy." It means that only by seeing the existing hope in the bear market can you get cheers in the bull market. In the BCH dispute, no one can convince anyone, and the market will eventually choose the right path and move towards a bright future.

Acknowledgements: Part of the article is quoted from the "Lightning HSL" public account.