The episode became extremely acrimonious, with Craig Wright (Bitcoin Cash Satoshi Vision, BCHSV) threatening to kill Jihan Wu and Roger Ver’s blockchain, BCHABC. He vowed a hashrate war, and warned the wider bitcoin mining community that if they supported ABC, he would sell huge amounts of BTC to crank up his mining effort. The fork and market movements associated with it appear to have triggered a crash in the wider crypto markets, providing the catalyst for an event that many analysts have argued was always coming. More on that tomorrow when we have our regular Tuesday market report.

You can see Wright’s warnings, taunts and boasts on his Twitter feed. Amongst other things, he threatens that if an all-out hashrate war occurs, he will end up selling enough BTC to bring the price down to 2014 levels. There is, of course, no proof he has this much BTC, and so far the threats have proven empty – just like when he promised to sign a message with Satoshi’s keys and then ranted and raved after he didn’t deliver. In fact, the Twitter account @satoshi has been active, promising doom for BTC, at least until it was suspended – and not before the community roundly panned its content and noted stylistic similarities to Craig’s writing…

So, where are we up to?

https://cash.coin.dance/ shows the height of each blockchain, and this situation is actually getting pretty interesting. At the start, ABC pulled ahead by up to 45 blocks and it looked like SV was falling badly behind. But Wright’s chain recovered ground over the weekend and is now 2 blocks ahead. This is actually getting pretty interesting. It’s a long-term competition, though, so don’t expect a final result overnight. One or other chain will pull conclusively and sustainably ahead, and the other will lose hashrate and market share.

When the outcome is clearer, that may play into greater clarity and confidence for the wider crypto markets too.

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Сообщение BCash update появились сначала на Crypto inferno.

When a vote is held, the ideal outcome is one that’s decisive. In other words, a clear majority should agree. That way, you bring as many people with you as you can, and those who do not agree recognise they are in the minority and that their views are not representative, so they don’t cause too much trouble.

That’s just as true for a democratic election as it is for a blockchain fork.

In the US and the UK, we have seen highly divisive votes in recent times. Both countries have been as split as it is possible to be. In the US, Clinton won the popular vote but lost the election to Trump – it was that close. Similarly in the UK, 51.9% of the population voted to leave the EU. It could not have been much more divided.

That division is playing out before our eyes today. Yesterday the UK Prime Minister announced that a deal for the terms of the UK’s departure had been struck with the EU after months of intensive negotiations. The cabinet agreed collectively, but was divided on the result – the first resignations have already occurred. Parliament is similarly divided, to the point where it appears no deal will be approved by MPs. And the country is still divided, perhaps as much as it was in 2016 when the referendum was held.

BCH is currently undergoing a hard fork, splitting off into BCHSV (Craig Wright’s project) and BCHABC (Jihan Wu and Roger Ver). The split is highly acrimonious, with Wright claiming he wants to kill the other chain. Absence of replay protection means that only one will be valid. Wright currently has the hashrate to destroy BCHABC, but Wu looks like he will fight back with some of the immense hash at his disposal. It’s like an election in which guns are used as votes (also known as ‘war’).

This reverberates far beyond BCH itself. Wright has been tweeting that if the hash war cranks up, each side will fund their effort with BTC – which will need to be sold to pay for hardware and electricity. And that will tank bitcoin. Wright says he will do it, and doesn’t care if BTC drops to $1,000 or less. Whether or not he has enough BTC, whether he does it in the end, is immaterial: that’s the propaganda.

Politics and crypto: they’re both pretty tawdry places right now. The BBC writes that the British government is ‘falling apart in front of our eyes’ – which could equally be said of BCH. And that’s why today the shape of the chart for Sterling against the dollar looks a lot like BTC/USD, albeit on a different scale.

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Сообщение BCash’s Brexit: how not to fork появились сначала на Crypto inferno.

Bitcoin Cash, better known by its derogatory title BCash, has had a particularly turbulent ride the last couple of weeks. Born out of strife – the coin was a blatant land-grab on the Bitcoin brand by a motley group of former bitcoin evangelists, mining moguls and Satoshi-wannabes – it’s fitting that relationships within the BCash group itself should have deteriorated to the point where the coin splits.

The whole episode illustrates everything that is disgusting about crypto – in fact, one of the wonderful things about it is that this partitions off some unpleasant players and pits them against each other, leaving the rest of the crypto world to get on with their own thing and eat popcorn. BCash was enormously controversial when it first launched, accompanied by a massive FUD campaign and a fork that at one point threatened to severely undermine the entire crypto world. The new fork is the result of a disagreement between different members of the BCash camp – notably Craig ‘Faketoshi’ Wright on the one hand, and Roger ‘Bitcoin Jesus’ Ver and Jihan Wu, co-founder of Bitmain, the largest producer of ASIC chips in the world, on the other.

Last week BCash saw a massive pump, taking it from 0.066 satoshis to 0.098 in a matter of days – a 50% appreciation. The narrative is that this was traders buying BCH ahead of the fork to get both coins. Naturally, the bubble burst well before the event itself, as there was little doubt it would (and as Inferno itself warned on Saturday). It would now surprise us greatly if BCH did not ultimately return to its previous pre-pump level. It was nothing more than a P&D, and likely many BTC belonging to Bitmain were spent in the effort.

At the time of writing, Wright’s BCHSV (‘Bitcoin Cash Satoshi Vision’) futures are trading at 0.018 sats on Poloniex, while Wu’s BCHABC is trading at 0.064, indicating the market is almost 4 times more confident in Wu than Wright.

That means that Wright, who claimed to be Satoshi and the creator of a $100 billion blockchain, will end up as the architect of a $2 billion market cap effort – and that’s before it dumps any further. Meanwhile, the in-fighting between Ver and Wright paints the whole BCash effort in a very poor light. BCash is consuming itself from within as the lies and deceit that have been a feature since Day #1 come back to bite it.

The whole episode can be summed up with the maxim: If you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas.

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Сообщение BCash: We hate to say ‘I told you so…’ появились сначала на Crypto inferno.

Bitcoin Cash – which we will henceforth call BCash due to Roger Ver’s intense dislike of the term – has been scammy and unpleasant from the start. If you want to fork Bitcoin, fine, go for it; plenty of others have. But the land-grab on the Bitcoin brand and the suggestion that BCash is the ‘real’ bitcoin, and the confusion that has resulted from that among newcomers, were unnecessary and dishonest. Born out of such bad faith, the chickens are now coming home to roost.

Key factions within the BCash community disagree with each other about the features that should be implemented, with the result that the protocol and community – such as it is – is about to split.

Back in August Craig Wright’s team released software to reinstate various features of the ‘original’ Bitcoin, calling it SV or ‘Satoshi Vision’. These include a block-size increase to 128 MB. Shortly after this Bitcoin ABC, the largest BCash client, released its own incompatible update. Jihan Wu launched an attack on Wright for his opposition to this, calling him ‘Fake Satoshi’. Vitalik Buterin, creator of Ethereum, piled in too, encouraging the BCash community to use this as an opportunity to send Wright packing once and for all.

While a tentative plan for compromise was brokered, it looks like BCash is slowly destroying itself from within, without any help required from anyone else. We look forward to the fork activation date on 15 November to see how this one will pan out.

It couldn’t have happened to a more deserving coin.

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Сообщение BCash faces totally deserved community split появились сначала на Crypto inferno.