As of right now, there is a war taking place inside the Bitcoin Cash community. This war has been dubbed the “Hash War” and it may have single handedly plunged the entire market.
The hash war is basically a civil war between two rival factions within the Bitcoin Cash community:
Bitcoin ABC: Bitcoin Adjustable Blocksize Cap is the camp that’s being led Roger Ver and Bitmain CEO Jihan Wu
Bitcoin SV: Bitcoin Satoshi’s Vision is led by Craig Wright (who claims to be Satoshi Nakamoto) and billionaire Calvin Ayre, the owner of the largest BCH pool, CoinGeek.
On November 2018, Bitcoin Cash went through a hard-fork and split into Bitcoin Cash ABC and Bitcoin Cash SV.
Both these chains are utilizing there hash power to mine the longest chain. Whoever has the longest and more efficient chain, becomes the dominant Bitcoin Cash chain.
So, this brings us to the obvious question.
Why is the hash war happening? Why are Roger Ver and Craig Wright at each other’s throats?
Well, there are two reasons:
Block size (surprise surprise!)
Changes to the Bitcoin Script
Block Size
Bitcoin ABC wants a block limit of 32 mb while Bitcoin SV wants a block limit of 128 mb, i.e. nearly 4 times that of the upgraded Bitcoin ABC block size.
Changes to the Script
As you may already know, Bitcoin transactions are coded by using “Script” We have a detailed two-part guide which will help you understand how script works.
One thing that you need to remember here, script is a purposefully simple and non-versatile language. It is not a highly-functional, Turing-Complete language like solidity which is used to create smart contracts. Script’s only purpose is to give form to Bitcoin transactions.
In August 2018, Bitcoin ABC introduced two new opcodes in the Bitcoin Cash script, with a hardfork. Those opcodes being:
OP_CHECKDATASIG
OP_CHECKDATASIGVERIFY
These opcodes basically brought in “smart contract-like” functionality into Bitcoin Cash by allowing the transactions to check and validate the signature on an external message, coming from a trusted external data source or oracle.
This change wasn’t acceptable to Bitcoin purists.
According to them, these opcodes and functionalities were never a part of Satoshi Nakamoto’s original vision. They wanted a Bitcoin Cash which was close to the original blueprint as possible. Hence, Bitcoin SV was born.
Bitcoin SV is not going to use these new opcodes. In fact, it will use two of the original Satoshi opcodes (OP_LSHIFT and OP_RSHIFT) which had been deactivated in the new version of Bitcoin Cash.
The Ugly Side of The Hash War
We will try to keep a very neutral stance here, but we need to report on just how ugly this war has become. More than Bitcoin ABC vs Bitcoin SV, this has become Roger “The Bitcoin Jesus” Ver vs Craig “I am Satoshi” Wright.
There has been blatant name calling and negativity from both the the sides. In fact, some of the arguments have been no different than over-the-top pro-wrestling style rants. This one being top of the bunch:
And then there is also the email that that Wright sent Ver, which we can’t post here because of its strong content. You can read it here.
Ver, on his part, had this to say about Wright, “Satoshi or not, the things Craig Wright is saying are exactly the things that caused me to sign up for Bitcoin in the first place.”
Who is Winning the War?
Let’s look into both the camps and see who is winning the Hash War. All graphs are taken from coin.dance.
#1 Hashrate
Since this battle is all about the hashrate then we might as well check who is doing the best in that regard:
It looks like Bitcoin ABC has had a superior hashrate than Bitcoin SV for the most part, in the beginning. There were some instances when Bitcoin SV was able to overtake Bitcoin ABC, but for the most part, Bitcoin ABC has been superior hashrate-wise….right until 3rd December 2018.
After that, it looks like Bitcoin ABC has suffered a big downturn in its hashrate while Bitcoin SV seems to have gotten the slight upper hand.
#2 Chain Length
One day after the fork, 16th November 2018, Bitcoin cash ABC raced ahead with 50 blocks. ABC seems to have a better overall POW strength than SV.
#3 ABC vs SV Nodes
Let’s look at how many nodes are in Bitcoin Cash ABC as opposed to Bitcoin Cash SV.
Bitcoin ABC has 1028 nodes right now. The number of nodes has decreased after seeing a peak on 16th August 2018.
Now, let’s look at Bitcoin SV nodes.
Bitcoin SV has a total of 542 nodes. The total number of nodes increased dramatically since 15th November 2018, i.e. the date of the Bitcoin Cash/Bitcoin SV hard fork. After reaching its peak, the number of nodes has been pretty consistent.
#4 Community Approval
Let’s look at which project is getting more approval from the companies and community.
According to coin.dance, 71.8% of the community supports Bitcoin ABC while Bitcoin SV has 44.9% of the support.
BTC Hashrate vs ABC+SV
Getting out of this civil war, let’s look at the big picture and see how BTC’s hashrate compares to that of ABC and SV’s combined.
As you can see, BTC far exceeds both of them combined.
What is the future of Bitcoin Cash?
In short, we don’t know. We have no idea how bitcoin cash is going to turn out in the future nor do we know the long term repercussions that it will have on BTC. What we do know is that this is the first time that anyone has successfully hard forked from BTC whilst keeping the records of the existing transactions.
What we have here is a very interesting experiment which will teach us a lot of lessons moving forward. At the same time, the 8 mb block size is definitely a very alluring aspect and it remains to be seen how this affects the miners in the long run.
However, the Hash War has opened up a very intriguing situation. With the sheer number of Bitcoin forks out there, it may dilute the value of Bitcoin even more. The current market crash has been largely attributed to this war. The sad part is that the hash war has become really ugly. Let’s hope that we get out of this unscathed.