The Bitcoin Cash (BCH) hard-fork drama is the most exciting story in Crypto today 🙄 Faketoshi declares war⚔️

Even if you don't care for Bitcoin Cash (BCH) the latest hard-fork drama is the still most exciting story in crypto these days, and it's definitely one to get the popcorn out for. With some resemblance to the 2017 BTC/BCH hard-fork the two opposing camps are engaging in an all-out war.

BCH drama

As you probably heard by now Bitcoin Cash (BCH) is going to hard-fork on november 15th and it's causing quite a stir in the BCH community. Former allies Roger Ver and Craig S. Wright now find themselves in opposing camps, both supporting rivalling hard-forks and the disagreements have since spiralled out of control leading to what pretty much amounts to declarations of war from both sides.

Some backstory: Bitcoin ABC, which is backed by Bitmain and Roger Ver, proposed an upgrade to BCH which includes several features (like smart-contracts) that opponents didn't like. In particular, Craig S. Wright (of 'Faketoshi' fame) objected to the proposal and with the help of his company nChain he decided to make his own proposal. This upgrade he would call Bitcoin Satoshi's Vision (Bitcoin SV). Both proposals are now in competition to convince the BCH miners to upgrade to their software. Much like the BTC/BCH split it seemed to be leading toward a chain-split with two BCH blockchains as a result - but Craig Wright doesn't appear to like that solution very much and he has declared an all-out war against Bitcoin ABC, and eventually all other blockchains.

The Wrath of Satoshi Nakamoto Craig Wright

At first it appeared Bitcoin ABC was winning the race for the hashingpower of the BCH network, capturing a large percentage of the BCH nodes and garnering support from large exchanges such as Binance and Coinbase, as well as being supported by Roger Ver's Bitcoin.com and the world's largest ASIC producer Bitmain. Things took a strange turn in the last few days, however, as Craig Wright's Bitcoin SV now has managed to convince over 2/3rds of the BCH miners to signal for the Bitcoin SV upgrade. Not only that, Craig Wright is calling for an all-out hash-war against Bitcoin ABC and vows to not only acquire the most hashrate in this race, but also use his hashingpower to cause the Bitcoin ABC blockchain to come to a screeching halt in order to destroy it.

According to Vin Armani, longtime BCH supporter and creator of Cointext, the plan is to secure Bitcoin SV and then use a 51% attack on Bitcoin ABC in order to fill it with empty blocks so that no transactions can go through (watch the video for more info!). The bogged down blockchain would decrease in profitability, incentivizing miners to switch to Bitcoin SV in order to remain profitable. This would lead Bitcoin ABC into a downward death-spiral and eventually to a price of $0 leading to the death of the chain. Craig Wright doesn't want to stop here though. After taking down Bitcoin ABC, he intends to execute the same plan against other proof-of-work blockchains as well, with the eventual goal of even taking down Bitcoin (BTC) so that only Bitcoin SV remains. These allegations are not being disputed by Craig Wright - instead he seems to strengthen them through a myriad of dubious tweets.

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His Twitter feed is filled to the brim with statements such as the above.

Should we be worried?

There are not many people in the world who believe Craig S. Wright is Satoshi Nakamoto, and with good reason. He has failed multiple times to prove himself as such and his behaviour and line of thinking is often disputed to be in line with that of Satoshi Nakamoto. Practically the only people who do believe him are those who support the Bitcoin SV fork. Even Vitalik Buterin, who is not known for over-exaggerating, came out on Twitter against Craig Wright to speak out against him.

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There is, in theory, a chance to accomplish the plan as described by Vin Armani. Theoretically if one has enough hashingpower it is possible to 51% attack every network. The question remains: Does Craig Wright have that much hashingpower? It's very unlikely that he does. It is true that Craig Wright is being supported by CoinGeek, the largest BCH miningpool, but compared to the total hashingpower of the Bitcoin (BTC) network the amount of available hashingpower on the BCH network is rather insignificant. Bitcoin (BTC)'s hashrate is about 10x larger than Bitcoin Cash (BCH)'s hashrate, and as such would require 10x as much hashingpower in order to 51% attack.

Within the BCH community Craig Wright has significant support for the time being, as the coin.dance graphs indicate. However, it should be noted that right now it is a lot more profitable to mine BTC than it is to mine BCH. Many BCH miners are thus expected to currently be mining BTC and it is expected that at the time of the hard-fork a lot of miners will return to BCH in order to change the distribution of votes. Additionally, let's not discount Bitmain which is the world's largest ASIC manufacturer. Reportedly Bitmain is installing 90.000 new Antminer S9's in order to mine BCH. The total amount of hashrate from those 90.000 miners alone is about 20-25% of the total BCH hashrate, so it's quite significant. Of course, most of Bitmain's miners are usually mining BTC and many of those can be (albeit temporarily - because of profitability) diverted to mine BCH in order to force the split towardes Bitcoin ABC.

The danger seems to be that Craig Wright's faction doesn't seem to care about mining at a loss. They claim to be willing to unprofitably mine for years in order to bleed the Bitcoin ABC camp dry. Whether they actually will remains to be seen, and Bitcoin ABC's side is by no means poor either. It might end up being a battle decided by who has the deepest pockets. Should Bitcoin SV succeed, however, it does not bode well for smaller proof-of-work blockchains. Despite Bitcoin (BTC) being well-protected by a large hashrate, smaller proof-of-work chains are very much at risk of being 51%-attacked. Most blockchains are rather cheap to attack in fact.

These are exciting times for Bitcoin Cash holders and I sympathize with the uncertainty within the community. It reminds me very much of the 2017 hard-fork drama where BCH split off from BTC. Interestingly enough, back then there were also rumours that large miners would collude to attack the opposing network and cause a death-spiral of BTC. Nothing of the like ever happened, of course.

Ironically, the problems BCH face are now much like the problems that BTC had when it split off from it. Back then it was also a popular figure in the community (Roger Ver) who divided it and caused uncertainty, even threatening the existence of the original chain. Now history repeats itself within BCH, where this time it's Roger Ver who faces trouble from another popular figure in the community and the threat appears as big to BCH as it was then to BTC.

I don't know which way this drama will go, but I'm glad I am not holding any BCH in this case so I can enjoy the drama without any emotional attachment. If it were my choice though, I'd probably side with Bitcoin ABC's camp (Roger Ver, Bitmain, etc.) rather than Bitcoin SV (Craig Wright). It seems to me like the Bitcoin SV side is terribly centralized, and Craig Wright's crazy hostility does not come across as professional, trustworthy or believable. To finish this off, here's a fun video where Roger Ver reads an e-mail out loud which was sent to him by Craig Wright. Have a look and then ask yourself: "Is this Satoshi Nakamoto?".

Nope.

_{(Art by: Roy Lichtenstein)}