BCH may usher in a second fork, and the game of rights is staged between miners and developers

Author |

Produced | Benz Finance

Author |

Three years ago, on August 1, Bitcoin miners executed a hard fork at block height 478558. Six hours later, the ViaBTC mining pool successfully dug out the first blockchain of BCH, and Bitcoin was officially divided into two parts. Chains: BTC and BCH.

Now that three years have passed, Yang Haipo, the founder of ViaBTC who supported BCH at the beginning, threatened to fork BCH again. Why is BTC always facing forks in the development process, what happened in the past three years, and what is the reason for BCH's forks?

secondary title

Review of the BCH fork event again

On August 5th, Vibit founder Yang Haipo expressed on Weibo that he had the idea of ​​forking BCH. The reason was that the Bitcoin ABC team announced the launch of the new Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment (DAA) algorithm Grasberg on July 23rd, but in fact the algorithm ignored After reading some important facts, the entire community is dissatisfied with the existing developers of Bitcoin ABC, so they want to fork and upgrade BCH again.

On the evening of August 6, a number of BCH developers issued a joint statement that the aserti3-2d difficulty adjustment algorithm (ASERT DAA) will be implemented on the BCH chain on November 15, 2020. These developers come from teams such as BU, Electron Cash, BCHD, BCHN, etc. There is no Bitcoin ABC team.

secondary title

The Birth of BCH

If you want to fully understand why BCH is facing a fork again, it is best to review the birth history of BCH, that is, the expansion history of Bitcoin.

As early as 2010, Bitcoin developer Jeff Garzik posted on the Bitcointalk forum, suggesting that the block size of Bitcoin be expanded to 7.1M, and then Satoshi Nakamoto replied that the block size of the Bitcoin network has not yet been filled, but it needs to be prepared for the future. ready for expansion.

Until 2013, the first global bull market in the true sense of Bitcoin came. At this time, the Bitcoin network began to face the problem of skyrocketing transactions. The occupancy of each block has reached 150K, which is about 15%. At this time, the topic of capacity expansion on Bitcointalk has become an absolute hot spot, and the camps of expansionists and opponents of expansion have emerged.

Although the market encountered a bear market, the number of users of the Bitcoin network did not decrease. By January 2015, the occupancy of each block of the Bitcoin network had reached 300K, which is 30%. At this time, the developers believed that, Considering the development progress, expansion is imminent.

Not long after, Blockstream, the financial supporter behind the Bitcoin Core technical team, began to develop Lightning Network technology. In February 2015, the Lightning Network white paper was released, and the Segregated Witness (Segwit) scheme was proposed in December of the same year. Since then, the Lightning Network has been written into the Bitcoin roadmap, forming the technical route of "Segregated Witness + Lightning Network". At this time, the contradiction between the expansionist and the anti-expansionist is intensifying.

By 2017, as we all know, this year is the beginning of a big bull market. In May, the number of Bitcoin blocks occupied has exceeded 1M. At this time, Bitcoin has officially been tortured by the problem of network congestion. The debate in the Bitcoin community on expansion It is also becoming more and more fierce. After facing the failure of the Hong Kong consensus and the New York consensus, the supporters of the expansion faction are determined to fork.

Forking is not only a dispute about block size, but also a dispute about belief. On August 1, 2017, supporters who insisted on the expansion plan forked a new chain from the Bitcoin network - Bitcoin Cash (Bitcoin Cash).

At this time, the BCH community ushered in a brief harmony. The two main development teams were Bitcoin ABC and nChain, and five other development communities.

secondary title

The Story of BCH and BSV

It stands to reason that the new BCH has expanded the block capacity, and the "peer-to-peer electronic cash system" has also been reflected, but the harmony did not last long, and internal conflicts occurred.

In April 2018, the Bitcoin ABC development team of BCH released a mid-term development roadmap, which was strongly opposed by Craig Wright, chief scientist of nChain. This was the first time that Bitcoin ABC caused dissatisfaction within the team.

Then in July, Craig Wright has been threatening to implement a fork called Bitcoin Satoshi Vision on the BCH protocol, firmly supporting Satoshi Nakamoto's idea, which is BSV. On November 15th, BCH was upgraded for the third time, and BCH officially forked into BCHABC and BCHSV.

Regarding the 32M block size and BCH scalability plan, Craig Wright believes that it is necessary to continue to support Satoshi Nakamoto's wishes and insist on expansion. The fork was initiated by Craig Wright, and no replay protection was set up. The two sides once engaged in a fierce computing power battle.

Until this time, although both Bitcoin ABC and nChain were supporters of the scaling faction, Craig Wright was dissatisfied with the development concept of Bitcoin ABC, which eventually led to the end of the two parties parting ways.

secondary title

The core reason for this fork of BCH

If the birth of BSV last time was due to disagreement between Craig Wright and the Bitcoin ABC team, then the reasons for this fork are also similar, except that a group of people has changed.

First of all, I need to introduce the current situation of miners here. Many miners do not focus on mining a certain currency, but will join the "machine gun pool". The difference between the smart pool and the ordinary mining pool is that the smart pool will automatically select the currency with the highest current mining revenue according to various parameters such as hash rate, mining difficulty, and currency price. That is, the coin that makes the most money will be mined, and the computing power will switch quickly.

Everyone knows that Bitcoin produces a block every 10 minutes, and the cycle of each difficulty adjustment is about 14 days. After the BCH upgrade in November 2017, the DAA difficulty adjustment mechanism has been adopted. Under this mechanism, the difficulty adjustment cycle It is greatly shortened, about 144 blocks, which is about 1 day.

Theoretically, the DAA mechanism can make the block generation of BCH more stable than that of BTC, but in fact, due to the existence of the machine gun pool, the block generation of BCH has become extremely unstable.

But here comes the problem. Amuary, the leader of the Bitcoin ABC team, is not happy. He also proposed an algorithm, but all other developers and the community are against it. However, he is the leader of the most widely used development team on the client side. His decision The importance is greater than the attitude of the miner community, so the incidents mentioned at the beginning of the article appeared: V God complained, Yang Haipo was very dissatisfied with Bitcoin ABC.

epilogue

secondary title

epilogue

The superficial reason for the conflict in the BCH community this time is that the smart pool miners have seriously affected the interests of fixed miners, and the algorithm modification unanimously requested by the community was rejected by the Bitcoin ABC team, and the community broke up with Bitcoin ABC.

The core reason is that apart from the disagreement on the difficulty algorithm, "Yang Haipo" is even more dissatisfied with the Bitcoin ABC team's control over BCH. It can also be seen from his Weibo statement that the Bitcoin ABC team does not respect other opinions of the community at all. .