BTC, BCH and BSV, who is the original intention of Satoshi Nakamoto?

Bitcoin is born

It all goes back to Satoshi Nakamoto's original intention to conceive the Bitcoin white paper.

Satoshi Nakamoto envisioned a type of "peer-to-peer electronic cash" that would avoid corruption and centralized manipulation during the 2008 economic collapse through decentralized and detrusted value transactions.

After the 2008 financial crisis, “quantitative easing” policies have emerged globally, and these policies are considered the culprits of inflation because they are based entirely on the idea of ​​“continuous printing of money”. This was the core of the conflict at the time, and the emergence of Bitcoin became the target of criticism.

Segregated Witness or Block Expansion?

In 2017, Bitcoin, as an effective trading method, encountered a bottleneck in the process of trying to expand and play a role. Critics have said that Bitcoin has become too popular and is not good for itself-that it cannot cope with the surge in popularity, which will lead to block congestion and excessive transaction costs. The bitcoin network at the end of 17 did confirm these concerns due to the surge in transaction demand.

Since then, some have tried to see Bitcoin more as a means of storing value. Money can be safely stored in Bitcoin, like a digital vault, and can only be withdrawn when people want to withdraw more money. Activities like buying a $ 2 cup of coffee are unrealistic, as transaction costs can be more expensive than the coffee itself, and it can take several hours to complete the transaction. For example, "lighter" cryptocurrencies such as Litecoin can more effectively and cheaply satisfy the demand for value transactions, at least until the Bitcoin network can successfully cope with the increased demand. But many people oppose this idea, because it violates the original idea of ​​p2p electronic cash, and the key features of p2p electronic cash are cheap procedures and easy to use.

Considering the scalability of the Bitcoin blockchain, developers propose their own solutions. One idea is to increase the capacity of each block. The advantage of this solution is that all transactions will remain "on-chain" and transactions will not be transferred to the off-chain mechanism. Those who support this scheme are called "on-chain people," and they claim that this is in line with Satoshi's original intention to design Bitcoin.

Fearing that it will lead to greater centralization, some people oppose block expansion. Block expansion will have higher memory requirements for nodes. Not everyone can afford such a large amount of memory. In the end, only a few people will act as node verification transactions to package blocks. Opponents believe that resisting centralization is also the original intention of Satoshi Nakamoto, and the "on-chain" expansion plan is difficult to meet decentralization.

Another solution, called SegWit, reduces the need for the Bitcoin blockchain by separating transaction signatures. This solution greatly improves the speed and throughput of Bitcoin transactions, but only after it is more widely adopted can we really see the highlights of the solution. Segregated Witness also offers more possibilities for layer 2 solutions and smart contracts linked to the Bitcoin network.

Segregated Witness has been successfully implemented through a user-activated soft fork (UASF). This is the current Bitcoin blockchain, but a "backup blockchain" was retained through the hard fork at the time in case something went wrong. Now, this "backup blockchain" is the Bitcoin Cash blockchain. This non-segregated witness "emergency plan" itself is a controversial existence, which has attracted the attention of many people in the Bitcoin community, and it provides the opponents of segregated witness with the possibility of withdrawing from the new chain midway.

As a result, two camps began to emerge. Some insist on using Segregated Witness, off-chain upgrades, and keeping the block size small, but others still firmly support the block expansion plan after the Segregated Witness upgrade. Proponents of block expansion resist the concept of relying on second-tier solutions and off-chain networks, which they believe is contrary to the original idea of ​​the Bitcoin protocol. Proponents of block expansion believe that the original Bitcoin blockchain does not require trust at all, but second-tier solutions such as Segregated Witness require some level of trust, so they are very dissatisfied. A heated debate followed that escalation.

So Bitcoin forked

Proponents of Bitcoin block expansion and Segregated Witness are arguing, and a fork has occurred. It is true that Bitcoin forks have occurred in the past, but the previous forks have not been accompanied by so much controversy, and the community division has never been so large.

Both communities now claim to be the true embodiment of Satoshi Nakamoto's vision, and both claim to be the true "Bitcoin."

On the other hand, those members of the community who support the Bitcoin blockchain using Segregated Witness sometimes ridiculously referred to Bitcoin Cash as Bcash to reduce its connection with the original name. This controversy over naming continues to this day, and you can often see the two different factions sneer at each other on Twitter and Reddit.

At the beginning, which version of Bitcoin will retain the "BTC" name on the exchange is still uncertain. The version with Segregated Witness eventually won, and "Bitcoin Cash" also received its own BCH name (because BCC was adopted by BitConnect) . All Bitcoin wallets received forked Bitcoin Cash (BCH) at a 1: 1 ratio.

Many well-known members of the Bitcoin community are in the block expansion camp, which has led to a fork. Since the fork, the r / btc sub-forum was established at the end of 2016 to evade censorship of the block expansion camp, and has now focused almost exclusively on Bitcoin Cash. The @Bitcoin account on Twitter fully supports Bitcoin Cash, but the account has suddenly and mysteriously abandoned it recently.

Bitcoin.com, owned by BCH core supporter Roger Ver, is the BCH website, while Bitcoin.org is the BTC website. To some extent, it also shows the community's firm belief in "Bitcoin Cash is Bitcoin", but this also often fuels the fire, making Bitcoin Cash considered black and white upside down.

Then Bitcoin Cash forked

Bitcoin Cash itself split into two blockchains last year, further exacerbating the fragmentation of the Bitcoin Cash network. One chain is reserved for Bitcoin Cash, and the other is called Bitcoin Satoshi Vision (BSV). Proponents of BSV are dissatisfied with the Bitcoin Cash solution. The fork is designed to "bring Bitcoin back to its original design." "Pure on-chain" network. Bitcoin SV (BSV) has failed to see mass adoption among crypto users and traders after a highly centralized hash rate war for "hegemony" and costing millions of dollars.

Who has the upper hand?

Since the appearance of Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin has gradually occupied a dominant position, and the status and use of Bitcoin Cash have also weakened. This is partly because the Bitcoin network maintains a huge advantage in hashing power, and its network security and transaction utilization rate are much higher than those of the Bitcoin Cash network. Even Dogecoin, which was originally a funny currency, has more trading volume and active addresses than Bitcoin Cash. At first, Bitcoin's Segregated Witness solution successfully reduced transaction costs and the main chain block load. Now its fee income far exceeds its competitors (BCH and BSV).

Who is safer?

Although the BCH network is still relatively cheap in terms of transaction costs, it still fails to defeat the expensive BTC network with transaction costs, and the security of Bitcoin Cash is also relatively low. For example, a one-hour 51% attack against Bitcoin Cash costs only $ 72,000, while the same attack against Bitcoin would cost about $ 550,000. The BSV network is more fragile than the BTC network and the BCH network, and the hash rate of the entire network is lower.

Therefore, compared with the use of BTC networks, the problem of dual payment on BCH or BSV networks is even more worrying, so the latter two require more heavy authentication before confirming the legality of the transaction. Although several miners successfully reorganized the BCH blockchain, recently they saw a miner threaten to control the entire network with 51% hash power, but it is impossible to attack the BTC network with the same hash power.

As inter-agency competition intensifies, BTC will play a leading role, while competitors such as BCH and BSV strive to find as much respect and practicality in the larger community as possible. The transaction volume on the BCH chain is extremely low, which makes the growth of the block size completely irrelevant, and the lower transaction costs mean a lack of network security.

With these two competitors offering few other services, Bitcoin seems destined to continue to dominate.