There’s 88 days left until the Bitcoin Cash upgrade scheduled for November 15, 2020, and the community has been watching miners closely. On August 18, the Bitcoin ABC team published a blog post that revealed a “feature freeze is now in place,” as it contains a new coinbase rule. Moreover, during the last few days, a few groups of bitcoin cash miners have been signaling “Powered by BCHN” in the block’s coinbase parameters.
The controversy in Bitcoin Cash land continues, but now most of the conversation is turning to watching miners. On August 5, news.Bitcoin.com reported on how the BCH difficulty adjustment algorithm (DAA) debate started a lot of infighting within the BCH community. This week a number of Bitcoin Cash mining pools have started to signal node implementations.
Following the DAA debate, the Bitcoin ABC team revealed it would leverage the ASERT DAA, however, the team also said it would add the Infrastructure Funding Proposal (IFP) coinbase rule as well. This decision continued to feed the blockchain bifurcation fears as a number of BCH supporters dislike the coinbase rule.
On August 18, Bitcoin ABC developers published a blogpost that revealed a new client release 0.22.0, which contains new features. Bitcoin ABC said a “feature freeze is now in place” and the features added include the ASERT DAA and “a new coinbase rule [that] will reinvest 8% of the coinbase reward.”
The 8% will be funneled into “Bitcoin Cash infrastructure development,” the blog post says. “That means more technical talent can be hired to maintain and develop the network so it can better support your business moving forward.”
Furthermore, the official Bitcoin.com Twitter account explained the firm’s recommended node implementation the same day. The tweet links to a blog post which details how Bitcoin.com’s infrastructure will operate.
“Effective immediately, Bitcoin.com will run the following node implementation for all Bitcoin.com products that mine, utilize, or otherwise rely on Bitcoin Cash: Bitcoin Cash Node (aka. BCHN) version 22.0.0 or later,” the official response from Bitcoin.com highlights.
“Furthermore, we strongly recommend that all individuals and organizations currently running Bitcoin Cash nodes also implement Bitcoin Cash Node (BCHN),” the Bitcoin.com announcement adds.
During the course of the day on Tuesday and into Wednesday, Bitcoin Cash supporters noticed that a number of mining pools have been signaling “BCHN.”
For instance, Binance blocks that have been mined say “powered by BCHN” and other mining pools like Btc.top’s coinbase parameter messages say the same statement.
Pools that have been signaling BCHN include; Binance, Hashpipe, P2pool, Easy2mine, Huobi, Btc.top, Bitcoin.com, and F2pool. A number of other pools (more than half) have not made any intentions toward signaling at this time.
The web portal Coin Dance, specifically the blocks section, shows the number of blocks mined from miners who are signaling and entities that have not signaled.
The website also shows a grid view of the last 1,000 BCH blocks mined and people can view that perspective as well. At the time of publication, there’s roughly 3.4 exahash per second (EH/s) of SHA256 hashrate dedicated to mining the Bitcoin Cash blockchain.
There’s also a number of discussions concerning the debate littered all over Twitter and Reddit forums like r/btc.