It’s been over forty-eight days since the hard fork, and the Bitcoin Cash (BCH) network is alive and well.
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Five Different Development Teams Are Working With the Bitcoin Cash Project
As the blockchain’s days continue, BCH developers have been revealing the upcoming plans to improve the cryptocurrency’s protocol. Discussions revolving around bitcoin cash development shows the protocol’s programmers have a very ambitious roadmap for the digital currency’s future. This includes a deep focus on on-chain scaling, and not fearing hard forks down the road in order to upgrade the BCH software. Currently, there are five development teams who say they are working with the BCH project, which include developers from Bitcoin ABC, Unlimited, Nchain, XT, and Classic.
Bitcoin Cash Developers Don’t Fear Hard Forks
At the moment there are lots of ideas being tossed around like a malleability fix without the additions Segregated Witness adds, and a different difficulty adjustment algorithm. To push these new ideas forward, some BCH developers are not afraid to hard fork the network occasionally.
“If we want to scale big we’ll have to do a hard fork from time to time,” explains Bitcoin ABC developer Amaury Séchet recent developers mailing list post. “Longer term, we may want to use extension point to add new features, but we are not there yet — more on extension points later on.”
Séchet and many other developers have been discussing quite a few different concepts regarding the future of Bitcoin Cash. The lead Bitcoin ABC developer Séchet mentions a new Merkle tree format and improving light client security with UTXO commitments. Other developers would also like to work on non-consensus changes to improve and make the BCH network more reliable. Development discussions have also revolved around how a hard fork should be coordinated and combining multiple changes in a consensus change.
Bitmain’s Jihan Wu: ‘Satoshi Made it Clear That Blocks Would Have to Grow’
Last week the CEO of Bitmain Technologies, Jihan Wu, was interviewed by the Chinese exchange Huobi and discussed the Bitcoin Cash network in great detail. Mr. Wu explains that he believes Satoshi made it clear that blocks would have to grow and hard forks were important to Bitcoin’s upgrade process.
“This was already apparent in Satoshi’s white paper, emails, and his discussions on bitcoin forums where he expressed similar views,” explains Mr. Wu’s translated interview.
Before Blockstream and their allies strangled opinions on certain important channels and media platforms, the entire bitcoin community was largely aligned with the plan towards Bitcoin’s block size upgrade.
‘These Events Have Never Occurred Before in Bitcoin’s History’
Mr. Wu says what left the deepest impression on him regarding the BCH network was how it found its initial price valuation during the first two weeks. “The price fluctuated violently and would triple in a few days then fall, because everyone was in the process of getting to know and accept it — This left the deepest impression on me.” The Bitmain founder also thinks the BCH difficulty adjustment mechanism is intriguing.
“These events are fascinating and have never occurred before in Bitcoin’s history,” Mr. Wu tells Huobi. “When we first saw this phenomenon with our own eyes we felt it was really fascinating.”
It has many implications for the switching over of computing power and how the value of assets are determined, and is worth researching.
It’s been over 8000 blocks since the hard fork and the BCH chain is 1200 blocks ahead of the legacy chain. It is currently 13.5 percent more profitable to mine BTC, but profit parity has been close and consistent for the past two weeks. At the moment, there are five known mining pools processing BCH blocks, and allegedly three unknown pools mining roughly 63 percent of the last 144 blocks. So far the BCH network has continued to grow stronger as the days continue with more supporters and infrastructure built around the protocol.
What do you think about the current state of the Bitcoin Cash network? Let us know in the comments below.
Images via Shutterstock, Bitcoin Cash, Twitter, and Pixabay.
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