It Is Currently More Profitable To Mine BCH Than BTC

I use coindance to watch the mining breakdown:

It is currently 8% more profitable to mine BCH than BTC right now.

The other key thing to notice is:

The Bitcoin Cash blockchain is currently operating at 13% of the original chain's difficulty.

Bitcoin Cash was coded with an Emergency Difficulty Adjustment that adjusts the difficulty of mining much quicker than Bitcoin: the original chain must wait 2016 blocks before it is readjusted to bring the time back to 10 minute blocks.

This article warns of a possible Bitcoin death spiral: an unlikely black swan event that could actually kill the original chain.

With a growing mempool size, and no way to adjust the difficulty quickly, mining power could move over to the BCH chain in droves while mining power flees from the original chain which is not adjusting quickly enough. Bitcoin transactions would come to a halt, lowering the price of BTC, and in turn raising the price of BCH which further increases incentive for miners to move to that chain.

Of course this assumes miners act 100% rationally at all times, which is not a fair assumption given BCH miners mined at a loss for weeks to adjust the difficulty down to this level: essentially they have adjusted the difficulty downwards 20% 9 times: .8^9 ~ 13.4%.

Segwit activation is expected to happen in less than a week: let's hope nothing earth shattering happens before then.

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My name is Ryan Daut and I'd love to have you as a follower. Click here to go to my page, then click in the upper right corner if you would like to see my blogs and articles regularly.

I am a professional gambler, and my interests include poker, fantasy sports, football, basketball, MMA, health and fitness, rock climbing, mathematics, astrophysics, cryptocurrency, and computer gaming.