The Nov. 15, 2018 BCH Hard Fork

On November 15th Bitcoin Cash will have a hard fork.

The block chain is going to split into 2 chains because the community of developers that were working together on BitcoinCash refused to come to a consensus agreement.

One chain will become BitcoinCashABC and the other will become BitcoinCashSV (Satoshi's Vision).

There are two sides to this ongoing fork-war. Calvin Ayre and friends like Craig Wright (Remember the guy who claimed to be Satoshi Nakamoto as an attempt to try to get out of trouble with the Australian Government?) and Roger Ver and friends (Jihan Wu).

What is a hard fork?

A hard fork happens anytime changes are made to the underlying code of a coin's blockchain. Any changes that are made to the blockchain result in a "fork" which will result in creating a "new" blockchain, therefore, creating a new coin. Some popular forks in the past include Monero's forks to remain asic resistant, or the BitcoinPrivate fork that actually combined technology from Zclassic and Bitcoin together to create a privacy coin. Each time a fork occurs, owner's of the forked coin are awarded the opportunity to get "free" coins. For example, for the ZCL and/or Bitcoin that I owned during the BitcoinPrivate fork, I was awarded 1 BTCP for every 1 Bitcoin that I owned and 1 BTCP for every 1 ZCL that I owned. Whenever participating in a fork to get your free coins, I will always advise that you keep your coins stored in your own wallet where you control your private keys. There are people who will try to seek out exchanges that support the hard forks, like Cryptopia or Bittrex for example, and put their coins in a wallet hosted on the exchange. They do this in hopes that they have the opportunity to SELL as soon as they get their coin. I still advise against this practice and suggest that you just hold the coins in your own wallet, don't be greedy, and just be patient. Usually transactions will be locked/closed on the exchanges that are supporting the fork, temporarily, anyways, until the network becomes stable and usable again.

Now that we know what a fork is, why is Bitcoin Cash forking?

The reason that BitcoinCash was created was to increase the blocksize of Bitcoin from 1mb blocks to 32mb blocks in the underlying blockchain of Bitcoin. BitcoinCash also rejects segwit. Remember, we can't make changes to the original blockchain's code without creating a new coin. This means that whenever the blocksize was increased, a new coin, BCH, was created.

The reason for increasing the blocksize was to allow for more transactions to happen, quicker. This is basically an attempt in scaling Bitcoin to make room for all of the new users. With BitcoinCash, users can now transact "Bitcoin" at high speeds and with lower fees.

BCH usually goes through 2 soft forks each year to perform updates on the code. But, this time it will be more then just a soft fork, it will be a hard fork, this hard fork is due to a "civil war" between two factions within the BCH community.

On one side we have BitcoinCashSV and on the other side we have BitcoinCashABC. We also have the Bitcoin Unlimited faction, which does not want to make any changes until a consensus can be agreed upon by everyone.

BitcoinCashABC

The BitcoinCashABC side seems to be the side that most major exchanges and platforms will be adopting but if anyone disagrees with that then please let us know in the comments. BitcoinCashABC consists of Jihan Wu, the co-founder of Bitmain, and friends.

The purpose of the ABC fork is to build the ability to have smart contracts on BitcoinCash similar to the Ethereum network. The fork intends to prepare the chain for increased blocksize in the future by working to fix some of the underlying problems that prevent BCH from scaling any further than it already has.

A 32mb blocksize already allows for "PayPal level transactions". This fork will prepare the chain for scale-ability in the future, so that the chain can be ready for more demand once the there is actual demand for it.

The BitcoinCashABC team supports anonymity and the freedom to use digital currencies as one pleases as long as it is in peace.

BitcoinCashSV (Satoshi's Vision)

The BitcoinCashSV (Satoshi's Vision) team consist of Craig Wright (Whether it is true or not, there are people that believe Craig Wright is actually Satoshi Nakamoto), Jimmy Nyugen, and Calvin Ayre. Craig Wright is the chief scientist for nChain, the foundation that is backing BSV. This version of BCH proposes to increase the block size all the way up to 128 mb.

This chain has a lot of support from miners and the mining pools that Craig Wright runs. Miners support big blocks because by keeping scaling on-chain, it keeps transaction fees on-chain. Miners get paid through transaction fees.

Craig Wright believes that the protocol that is implemented now should not have to be changed in the future and that is why they are increasing the block size all the way up to a whopping 128 megabytes, now.

Craig Wright also believes that there should be no anonymity in cryptocurrency. He claims to be working on a project that will map the entire deep web as well as ID every Zcash and Monero transaction by the end of 2019. He is anti-anonymity because his foundation, nChain, seeks institutional investors.

Craig Wright has threatened the BitcoincashABC team with 51% attacks in an attempt to scare them into siding with them. They will do whatever they can to throw a wrench into ABC's plans including using an attack known as "Satoshi's Shotgun" that involves flooding the network with millions of small transactions.

Both sides of the "fork-war" want is to scale bitcoin, which needs to be done at some point. It is how they are going about it that is different. It is the way they are going about it that is causing controversy. Hard forks can be a dangerous thing to crypto because of the problems and madness that comes along with it.

Taking everything into consideration, we need to understand that there are underlying issues with the blockchain technology that need to be understood fully and fixed before we can raise the block size to the levels that BSV wants to raise them to. BitcoinCashABC seems to be taking a more realistic approach to the whole situation by not raising the block size to levels that can't even be propagated by the network, yet.

If you want to take advantage of the fork by earning yourself some free coins then you need to be very careful. Exchanges like Coinbase and Binance both claim to support the fork but this does not mean that you will actually be getting all the different forked versions of the coin. It is more likely that they will just support BitcoinABC.

To actually get your free coins, then you are going to want to create yourself a local desktop wallet, one that you provide the private keys for. For hardforks, I generally recommend the electrum wallet by default because it is a desktop wallet that I can store on a USB drive, or use as a paper wallet, and recreate the wallet from my private keys, anywhere or anytime that I need to.

There WILL BE scams out there with fake wallets and fake exchanges that will ask you to enter your private keys or ask you to send your BCH to the scam wallet/platform/exchange in order to get your free coins. DO NOT fall for this. Only use trusted wallets from trusted and vetted sources. Check the wallets section of bitcoincash.org if you are unsure of where to start looking.

The electron wallet has announced that they will be supporting BCH and BSV so this should be safe choice for anyone looking to take advantage of the fork. Simply buy yourself some BCH if you don't already have some and then send it to your Electron wallet. You may want to avoid moving the funds for a while because BSV has announced that they WILL be attacking the BCH network, which will cause it to be unstable for quite some time after the fork.

Electrum's BCH wallet is called the Electron wallet and you can get some more info regarding the upcoming hard fork, here: https://electroncash.org/nov2018.html.

Electron Wallet: https://electroncash.org/

Sign up for Coinbase here:
(https://www.coinbase.com/join/59fd6beea6ecfb00fffd9c90)

Sign up for Binance here:
(https://www.binance.com/?ref=13115625)

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