The True and False Monkey King: Bitcoin Edition

In two days, that is, before 8 o'clock the night after tomorrow, Bitcoin will fork. With the birth of BCC and the approach of BCG and Segwit2X, the debate over real and fake Bitcoin has become more intense.

Some people think that BCC is the real Bitcoin, while others think that Bitcoin should stick to the original chain. How will this annual drama of "The True and False Monkey King" end? Let's listen to Lao Wu's groan.

1 “BCC is the real Bitcoin!”

Recently, Bitcoin Jesus founder Roger Ver and Bitcoin Cash supporter Calvin Ayre announced a plan. They decided to use their influence and considerable wealth to rename Bitcoin Cash as "Bitcoin."

Calvin Ayre and Roger Ver

In a joint statement posted on their respective company websites, they declared Bitcoin Cash to be in line with Satoshi Nakamoto's vision and began referring to it as "Bitcoin". Their websites have described the existing blockchain as the Segwit chain, which will be divided into SegWit1x (SW1) and SegWit2x (SW2) after the upcoming hard fork in November.

The announcement stated that Bitcoin Cash (BCC) is the only Bitcoin that resembles a natural continuation of the original Bitcoin. All the Segwit chains formed after the fork have changed many basic properties of Bitcoin, and it seems that it is not appropriate to refer to any of them with the name Bitcoin.

The two bigwigs have made it clear that Bitcoin Cash (BCC) is the currency that is most qualified to be called "Bitcoin". The "Bitcoin" that people are talking about now is not the real Bitcoin.

2 “BCC is not Bitcoin at all!”

The above Bitcoin.com announcement that Bitcoin Cash (BCC) is Bitcoin has caused controversy in the community shortly after it was released. Some top professionals in the industry have strongly opposed this view, including Charlie Lee, the founder of Litecoin (LTC).

Charlie Lee, the founder of Litecoin (LTC), said that BCC cannot compare with Bitcoin in all aspects. Lee said: "Many newcomers will be misled by Bitcoin.com. This article is full of lies and FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt). The absence of replace-by-fee does not mean that unconfirmed transactions are safe. In addition, even with Segregated Witness (SegWit), confirmed transactions are irreversible. Segregated witness signatures are not removed from transactions, but the transaction data structure is changed, making it more secure."

In other words, according to Litecoin founder Charlie Lee, Bitcoin Cash (BCC) is not qualified to be called "Bitcoin". But he did not comment on which chain of coins is more qualified after the Bitcoin fork. Charlie Lee said that the final result is not important, but in the Bitcoin and cryptocurrency market, it is wrong to deliberately confuse newcomers.

3 Bitcoin Fork History

It is normal for blockchain-based digital currencies to fork, and as Bitcoin is the leader in the currency circle, fork events have a long history.

In 2012, Bitcoin had an important upgrade called P2SH, which was called "multi-signature soft fork" by the community. This is a modification of the Bitcoin transaction signature script, which makes it very convenient to send Bitcoin transactions through multi-signature.

On March 12, 2013, Bitcoin had a hard fork. After the release of bitcoinqt 0.8.0, miners who upgraded and did not upgrade bitcoinqt 0.8.0 caused the Bitcoin blockchain to have two chains, one containing blocks larger than 800kb, and the other refusing to recognize these chains containing larger blocks. The final result was that miners using bitcoinqt 0.8 gave up the chain they were mining and returned to bitcoinqt 0.7 to continue mining.

In July 2015, the Bitcoin blockchain had a hard fork at block height 363731. At that time, Bitcoin Core developers added BIP 66 to the new version of Bitcoin Core 0.10.0. The main mining pools on the Bitcoin network used version 0.10 of the software, but one mining pool, BTC Nuggets, did not upgrade, resulting in a split into two chains. The final result was that bitcoin.org issued an announcement calling on miners to upgrade to bitcoin core version 0.10.2 to eliminate the fork.

In February 2016, Bitcoin experienced a soft fork when Bitcoin Core was upgraded to Bitcoin Core 0.12.1. Unlike previous updates, Bitcoin Core 0.12.1 focused more on improving the scalability of the Bitcoin network and introduced four different Bitcoin Improvement Proposals, namely BIP 9, BIP68, BIP 112, and BIP 113. The inclusion of these new BIPs made Bitcoin Core more compatible with soft forks and the implementation of the Lightning Network to solve the Bitcoin block size and transaction backlog issues, and was called a CSV soft fork by the community.

On August 1, 2017, the first Bitcoin Cash block (height 478559) was mined, with a block size of 1.9MB and 6985 transaction records. This marks the official birth of Bitcoin Cash (BCC). BCC has made its own modifications to the Bitcoin code, supporting large blocks (increasing the block size to 8M), dynamic block difficulty adjustment, and no segregated witness function. It is essentially a new type of digital asset different from BTC.

4 Forks are coming

According to the author's understanding, Bitcoin will have two more forks in the near future, as follows:

On October 25, the day after tomorrow, Bitcoin will fork out a currency called Bitcoin Gold (BCG). The project was first announced on Bitcointalk.org in July and was created by Jack Liao, the creator of Lightning ASIC. The company that developed Bitcoin Gold is headquartered in Hong Kong and is headed by an anonymous developer named "h4x3". According to the development team, Bitcoin Gold will use the Equihash algorithm adopted by the competing currency Zcash instead of Bitcoin's original SHA256. Bitcoin Gold can implement the UAHF (user-activated hard fork) proposal and accept GPU mining.

On November 19, Bitcoin Segwit2x hard fork may occur, which aims to increase the block size from 1M to 2M. If the hard fork succeeds, it is likely to split into two chains, the old 1M blockchain and the new 2M blockchain. At that time, supporters of the two new blockchains will claim that what they hold is the real Bitcoin, and others are alternative coins or useless minorities.

Therefore, it is not just BCC that will compete with Bitcoin for the title of “Monkey King”, but perhaps also the upcoming Bitcoin Gold (BCG) and the new currency generated after the Segwit2X fork.