Article丨Mark@深链金融
As the end of 2020 approaches, Bitcoin will go through its 12th year. After 12 years of ups and downs and controversies, Bitcoin has entered the mainstream view, and more altcoins have emerged. Among them, I have to mention BCH-Bitcoin’s fork coin. Because of differences in expansion, BCH forked from Bitcoin, which caused huge controversy. Subsequently, the BCH community was split into BCH and BSV again. Just in November, BCH will conduct a new fork.
Bitcoin 12th anniversary, BCH forks again
On October 31, 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto published the Bitcoin white paper “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System” on the mailing list of the cypherpunk website. To this day, the Bitcoin white paper has been released for 12 years. According to incomplete statistics, in the history of Bitcoin’s development, there have been more than hundreds of fork projects, and Bitcoin’s code base references are quite active. Just like the rise of DeFi liquid mining this year, the market has forked projects for mining various crops, Bitcoin’s forked project has also made the entire ecosystem active.
Looking at these forks, we can find that the best-developed one is BCH. For forked coins, most of them are just temporary hot spots. If the team cannot continue to operate, develop projects, develop communities and ecology, the price of the coin will eventually return to zero. Because of the strong community support and healthy development environment, BCH has been continuously expanding its consensus and attracting more users to participate. Looking back on the development history of BCH, BCH was forked from BTC due to the expansion dispute, and then BSV was forked from BCH due to the problem of the BCH development route, and then BCH faced a new fork challenge-possibly at 11 A new fork will take place on the 15th.
The contradiction of BCH’s current fork is whether to start IFP. The Chinese name of the IFP is called the Infrastructure Financial Plan. If it is successfully launched, the BCH mined by the miners will be pumped by the development team by 8%. Now the community has been divided into two factions, BCHN and BCHA. The BCHA group believes that the BCH team’s project development and maintenance require funds, and starting IFP will be able to solve the funding problem, which is more conducive to the development of the project in the long run. The BCHN faction believes that project pumping seriously violates the vision of decentralization, and that BCH will deviate from the original path of Bitcoin and does not conform to the spirit of the blockchain. Especially in the eyes of miners, IFP is undoubtedly a “strong donation.” Prior to this, Wu Jihan had wanted to promote IFP and give more financial support to the BCH development team, but for various reasons, he finally stopped.
Analysts pointed out that the main reason that the BCH community opposes IFP is that the main supporter of BCH is the group of miners, and IFP will reduce the income of miners. For large users, they may be more inclined to support IFP, so that the development team has more funds for project development. Although BCH does not originate from the chain’s own development funds, the BCH development team has always been supported by donated funds. According to Twitter users, BCH’s development fund raising target by next year is 3.3 million U.S. dollars, and the team has received more than 7,000 BCH. Therefore, there is no shortage of development funds. However, from the long-term development of the project, development funds It is still a constraint. At present, based on information from the media and social platforms, we can classify the main supporters of the two lineups: one is the BCHN community with supporters such as Yang Haibo, Roger, and Jiang Zhuoer; the other is the chief developer of BCH BCHA community supported by Amaury and his team.
Yang Haibo, the founder of VIA mining pool and CoinEX, believes that the BCH fork is very successful. Although it has not yet reached the level of surpassing Bitcoin, the community is quite strong. In the upcoming BCH fork, Yang Haipo is also a major participant. CoinEx even launched BCHA and BCHN futures in August. In Jiang Zhuoer’s view, the fork can bring heat and airdrop tokens to BCH and allow some investors to participate in the construction of the BCH community. This is good news for BCH. The fork of BCH is undoubtedly a hot spot in the industry in the short term. Behind it is the game between the miners and the development team due to the interest relationship, but for the BCH community, another split will inevitably make investors feel more about BCH and its value. doubt.
The community is divided, the past and present of BCH
As mentioned above, forks have become commonplace for BCH, and the birth and development of BCH are accompanied by forks. The birth of BCH is not accidental. It comes from the contradiction between Bitcoin core developers and miners that cannot be reconciled for a long time.
In order to solve the problem of expansion, on August 1, 2017, with the strong support of Bitmain, BCC (later renamed BCH) was hard-forked from Bitcoin. Adopt 8M (subsequently changed to 32M) large blocks, does not support Segregated Witness (Bitcoin support), and the rest such as algorithms are the same as Bitcoin. On November 13th, the fork upgrade was performed again, BCC was renamed BCH, and the mining difficulty was adjusted, but no new tokens were generated.
After the fork, many miners hope that BCH, which has a more reasonable expansion plan, can become a real Bitcoin, but the facts have proved that the Bitcoin consensus is difficult to break. Soon after the fork, although BCH’s influence continued to expand, the community was also quite active, supported by exchanges and wallets, and its market value remained stable in the top 10. But BCH still failed to become a real Bitcoin, but gradually became known as the “Prince”.
On November 16, 2018, BCH conducted another hard fork. The original community was divided into two camps, BCHABC and BCHSV. This time, the main contradictions between the two camps are concentrated in three aspects: the first is the battle for BCH expansion. In order to improve transaction efficiency, the BCHSV camp represented by Satoshi Aoban wants to continue to expand the block capacity of BCH. But Bitmain and BCHABC disagree. In their opinion, the existing 32M block limit is sufficient and there is no need to expand the capacity to 128M again. The second is the divergence of development routes. BCHSV advocates returning to the Bitcoin route and maintaining the same vision as Satoshi Nakamoto, while BCHABC wants to adapt to the development of the market. The last is the struggle of interests behind. Both BCHABC and BCHSV are supported by large mining pools, and miners are also profit-seekers. Wherever the profits are high, which project is supported, it can also be seen from the switch of anonymous computing power in the computing power war that there are several major mines involved. Disputes over the interests of the pool.
Many people may not know the reason for the partial fork of BCH, but the impact of the fork on the entire cryptocurrency market is clear at a glance. According to the previous data of Bitmex Research, the computing power war between BCH and BSV caused a total loss of 18 million U.S. dollars for miners. The computing power war triggered a large-scale sell-off of the entire market. Bitcoin dropped by more than 10% that day, and the price of BCH has since been as high as 75% drop. It can be said that it has had a considerable impact on the market in the short term. However, judging from the development of the subsequent two projects, BCH’s current market value is 4.47 billion U.S. dollars, ranking fifth in market value. BSV’s current market value is 2.833 billion US dollars, ranking 12th in market value.
Although the market value of BSV has shrunk severely, compared with the route that most of the previous fork projects eventually went to zero, it can be seen that this fork was relatively successful. All in all, from the birth of BCH to the bifurcation of BCH, in addition to wanting to make the project develop better, it is more out of interest considerations behind it. When the mining pool is capable of controlling most of the computing power of a project, who would give up a more favorable choice?
On the eve of the new fork, the outcome may be determined
The K-line chart of BCH in the past 2 months. Source: binance.com Since the news that BCH will fork again this year, the market has begun to approach BCH, and the price of BCH has also slowly increased. Especially in the second half of October, the intensive news about the BCH fork also vaguely brought a new round of market. Currently, in terms of exchanges, Huobi and OKEx support the fork of BCH. Judging from the content of the announcement, the ability to inherit the name of BCH will depend on which of BCHA and BCHN is more expensive. OKEx announced on October 28 that it will stop the BCH leveraged currency lending function on November 8th, and stop recharge business and suspend currency and leverage trading on November 14. And on November 15th, before the BCH hard fork snapshot, the forked tokens will be airdropped to user accounts at a 1:1 ratio.
Details of the price of the BCH bifurcation coin Currently CoinEx has supported the two-way conversion of BCH, BCHA and BCHN. In its futures market, the price of BCHN is currently 13 times that of BCHA. Judging from the current futures prices, BCHN has a relatively large advantage and is likely to inherit the name of BCH.
The proportion of BCH blocks produced in the past 7 days. Data source: Coin.dance. From the perspective of block production, BCHN also has a great advantage. 74.7% of BCH blocks are dug out by the BCHN camp, and the computing power of the BCHN camp has been More than 50% of the entire network, while the computing power of BCHA is only 0.8%.
The main reason is that the BCHA route will make the miners pay 8% tax, and the miners will naturally not support it. In some people’s eyes, although the fork has not yet started, there does not seem to be much suspense about the outcome. In addition, there are speculators in the market related to the BCH fork. At present, BCH investors have begun to appear in the market, and these investors want to obtain more income through airdrops than holding BCH. There are even users who will hedge in the contract market after buying the spot, and obtain a risk-free airdrop of forked tokens through the combination of spot and futures. However, the current BCH fork has great uncertainty, and trading or investing in fork futures tokens will involve considerable risks. If a chain lacks the support of miners, it may not survive, and the relevant tokens held will have a zero risk.
Therefore, we must remain cautious about BCH investment. This fork actually shows one thing, BCH belongs to the community, even the main development team cannot do things that violate the consensus of the community because of their interests, otherwise they will be abandoned by the community.
references:
“BCH is about to hard fork Bitcoin’s “eldest grandson” is coming”
“OKEx Insights: On the eve of the second fork, understand the history of BCH forks in one article”
“BCH re-fork NODE development team against ABC”
WWW.BLOCKCAST.CC 