Why nobody is mining Bitcoin Cash

in #bitcoin7 years ago

After the fork of Bitcoin cash, we have a situation whereby there is a lack of blocks being mined on bitcoin cash, to a point where we have to wait up to 13 hours for a block. This is creating a situation where users have to wait for a long time to wait for confirmations before the transactions take place (very frustrating if you want to send your bitcoin cash to an exchange, which typically waits for 3 confirmations).

These gaps are due to the randomness of block creation.

Why nobody is mining

The reason why nobody is mining bitcoin cash is that it's not profitable, rather its nowhere near as profitable as bitcoin. When the fork happened, bitcoin cash inherited Bitcoin's mining difficulty. That means right now, the mining difficulty is the SAME, but the payout is in Bitcoin cash instead of Bitcoin. This means miners would get paid in an inferior currency for the same amount of work. Assuming miners are doing this for profit, it makes no business sense to mine bitcoin cash until the difficulty reduces.

ViaBTC

One thing that is surprising is how few blocks are mined by ViaBTC - the guys who originally proposed this and started trading this before the split. Guess they still want their fat bitcoin payouts

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Currently, users have to wait longer for blocks because Bitcoin Cash mining difficulty needs time to readjust. But after difficulty drops, blocks will come in faster and more miners will switch from B-Core to Bitcoin Cash.

You can notice it already that blocks are coming in in a shorter time frame because difficulty is in the process of declining.

How does this readjusting work ?

Every time a blocks takes more than 12 hours to be found (median time of last 12 blocks) the difficulty readjusts by 20%.

Is this how the majority of crypto currency's work or just Bitcoin cash?

And also for bitcoin cash is it BCH or BCC?

Difficulty is set by coin.
BCH is BitcoinCash, BCC is Bitconnect.

Thanks for the explanation!
So it's only the miners that initiated the fork who are currently supporting BCC?

Not all of them but yes.....the purpose is to get difficulty as low as possible without letting BCC die. If you thing about it it is a genius move this whole fork thing. It's making them a LOT of money. I can't avoid connecting the UAHF with the black weekend we had a couple of weeks ago when clearly the markets were manipulated and Bitcoin halved its price on a weekend (when big players are offline) only to be back to normal in a few days.

Thanks for clarifying.
I wonder if it actually is making money, i.e. bringing new money in the market, or if money is just shifted around and manipulated due to low availability as you already indicate...

It was a bad and unecessary move. Now look at this crap we have to put up with.

Hard to predict markets. We really don't know the depth of these new waters. Time will tell...

I'm not a fanboy of any coin but support the tech. Not sure where all the butthurt people came from
that want BCH dead and want it to fall away. Competition is good,free markets are good,choices are good.
It's another option and a check to keep everyone honest. It's another test bed to perfect the tech.
It's a good thing and its not going away, so better to get used to it. Your limiting your mind and options.

I thought the whole idea of the fork was to make BTC more efficient by reducing tx cost and tx time which Bitcoin Cash wanted to do. Please correct me if I am wrong! has this forking backfired on Bitcoin Cash?

Bitcoin cash still has a long way to go

I see a huge crash in bitcoin cash in the near future :)

Seems confusing that some people are referring to Bitcoin Cash as BCC but BitConnect was already listed as BCC previously.

Probably a dumb question but given they changed the code for block size why the hell didn't they drop the difficulty? :)

It's a process that is taking place right now. Miners are not mining on purpose to get de difficulty down to what makes it profitable to mine again. But the process is automatic depending on the time it takes to find blocks. If a lot of mining power suddenly joins the network, they will be able to mine with ease for a short period of time as difficulty will rise accordingly to keep block time steady. Right now the opposite is happening.

Would have been better to dump the difficulty at the fork and then let it ramp, at least that way less initial interruption.

That said, could have been intentional. By having the high difficult and stupid block times it makes far harder for people it instantly dump their holding and hence give the fork more chance

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