1. The birth of BTC, BCH, and BSV
In 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto published a white paper "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System", stating his new vision for electronic money-Bitcoin was born. A decentralized electronic cash system based on P2P network transmission is constructed in the white paper. Through this system, we can realize global instant electronic cash transfer and solve the problem of generating, storing and transmitting exchange value on the Internet. On January 3, 2009, the Bitcoin genesis block was born. Bitcoin was initially only popular among geeks. After several years of development, Bitcoin has gradually entered the public eye. The user group has been expanding, and the price of the currency has also risen.
However, since the second half of 2013, many users reported that their transactions were delayed for a long time before they were executed. After observation, it was found that this was caused by Bitcoin's inability to process network-related information in a timely manner. The Bitcoin system adds a block to the blockchain every 10 minutes. However, under the limit of 1MB block size, the transactions that can be stored in each block are very limited, which limits the throughput of the entire transaction. The Bitcoin network has begun to experience congestion, excessive handling fees, and long-term transactions that cannot be packaged. At that time, Bitcoin can process about 4-7 transactions per second. If you compare it with the global payment networks Visa, American Express or PayPal, Visa needs to process 4.7 transactions per second during the Christmas season of 2013. Obviously, the transaction efficiency of BTC at that time could not afford the cash payment function.
In 2015, there was a voice of expansion in the Bitcoin community. Miners supported the expansion of Bitcoin blocks to increase transaction capacity, while small block developers represented by core developer Core believed that this could not fundamentally solve the problem. Use Segregated Witness and Lightning Network to alleviate Bitcoin's congestion problem. The game between miners, development teams, and users is relatively chaotic. The Bitcoin community has been arguing about expansion for three years. The conflicts in the community have gradually become unreconcilable, and the sound of hard forks has become more and more intense.
finally performed a hard fork at block height 478558 on August 1, 2017. Six hours later, the ViaBTC mining pool successfully dug the first BitcoinCash block (nr 478559), Bitcoin The community has since been divided into two. Bitcoin Cash took over Bitcoin transaction data, but removed Segregated Witness, and upgraded the block limit to 8M (later upgraded to 32M). It is committed to solving block congestion and handling fees in the Bitcoin system through on-chain capacity expansion. For higher issues, then BCH will be distributed to Bitcoin holders in a 1:1 ratio of Bitcoin. In order to improve the system, BCH conducts a hard fork every six months. Since then, BCH has undergone several upgrades, and the system has gradually stabilized, and its market value has entered the top ten of encrypted assets.
In April 2018, the BCH community released a mid-term development roadmap, indicating that BCH will be technically upgraded and improved. It mainly includes two aspects: one is to expand the block size to 32MB (completed in May); the other is to add or reactivate several Bitcoin script operation codes (op codes) to allow the BCH network to have and The application of smart contracts like Ethereum can expand BCH's more applications.
However, CW, an Australian scientist who claims to be Satoshi Nakamoto, clearly opposes the plan. He believes that Bitcoin has established a solid cornerstone in version 0.1. All BCH needs to do is to: 1) expand the capacity; 2) lock the agreement and declare that it will" Completely lock the underlying Bitcoin protocol and expand the capacity to 128MB". To this end, a project named Nchain was established and the BSV node client was created on August 16, 2018. It was threatened to implement a fork coin named Bitcoin Satoshi Vision (BSV) on the BCH protocol, with the goal of restoring Bitcoin Original agreement. After several rounds of confrontation between the two major camps, the contradiction reached the extreme again and it was impossible to coordinate. On November 16, 2018, BCH officially hard forks into BCHABC and BCHSV. This fork of led to a split in consensus, and mainstream currencies plummeted. Since then, BSV conducted a "hard fork" on July 24, 2019, increasing the block size from 128MB to 2GB, which is higher than any other blockchain project. And in the few days after the upgrade, a 256MB area was successfully dug out on the BSV chainBlock, refreshing the world record for the largest block mined by the public chain.
(BCH bifurcation timeline chart)
So far, the Bitcoin camp has formed a trio of nations.
2. Mechanism design and strategic vision of BTC, BCH, and BSV. The
soft-hard fork dispute is just a superficiality, and is essentially a line dispute.
BTC:
Core adheres to the 1M block size to ensure a lower threshold for full nodes. Even an ordinary computer can run a full node, which is more decentralized. Advocating the use of Segregated Witness and Lightning Network to alleviate Bitcoin's congestion problem. Both Segregated Witness and Lightning Network belong to the content of the blockchain expansion plan. In simple terms, Segregated Witness refers to splitting the information of a transaction and recording only part of the important information in the blockchain to reduce each transaction. The size of the transaction increases the number of transactions processed in each block. The Lightning Network uses part of the transaction to be processed off-chain. The transactions of both parties within a period of time are only recorded by both parties. After a period of time, the final transaction results are broadcast to other nodes and recorded in the blockchain. Such multiple transactions actually only need to be recorded once, which is suitable for frequent and small transactions.
In August 2017, the Core-led BTC officially activated the Segregated Witness function for capacity expansion. In December 2017, the Lightning Network was also successfully deployed on the Bitcoin mainnet.
According to statistics from 1ml.com, as of November 14, the carrying capacity of the Bitcoin Lightning Network was 1038.63 BTC; the number of nodes was 14574, an increase of 2.91% in the past 30 days; there were 35288 channels in the past 30 days A decrease of 2.2%. Comparing the data on April 19, 2019, the carrying capacity of the Bitcoin Lightning Network was 1063.42 BTC, the number of nodes was 8065, and the number of channels was 38,637. Over the past year, the number of Bitcoin Lightning Network nodes has increased by 80%, but the number of channels and BTC carried by the network have not risen but fallen, and development is weak.
(BTC Lightning Network data, picture from 1ml.com)
BTC still cannot get rid of the problems of congestion and high handling fees, and cannot afford the most important function of cash "payment", embarking on the path of "electronic gold" storage.
BCH: The block size of
BCH extension 1M is 32M, adhere to the chain expansion route. And re-enable a batch of OP-codes, which will allow the creation of different types of metadata, such as representative tokens and the execution of smart contracts. Users can create some complex applications on them and explore the integration of payment and applications. As one road. However, the dissolution of Wormhole and the Copernicus development team announced the temporary failure and end of the smart contract direction. Judging from the recent development route of BCH, there is another intention to return to pure "electronic cash".
(encrypted pass ATM histogram, the picture is from coinatmradar)
ATM machine can provide users with services including encrypted pass exchange and withdrawal, encrypted pass purchase and cash transfer. As of April 8, 2020, there are 11,963 encrypted ATMs worldwide. At present, there are 3,821 ATMs that provide withdrawal or deposit and withdrawal services of BCH in the world, accounting for about 32% of all cryptocurrency ATMs, ranking fourth in the total number of all cryptocurrency ATMs. There are 11,953 ATMs that provide BTC withdrawal or deposit and withdrawal services, accounting for about 99.9% of all cryptocurrency ATMs. BCH is still far lower than BTC in terms of payment consensus.
BSV:
BSV carried out a "hard fork" on July 24, 2019, increasing the block size from 128MB to 2GB. In the creation upgrade, it completely removed the concept of hard online, so Bsv is also called unlimited expansion. In theory, bsv can generate super large blocks. After lifting the block limit, Bsv laid the foundation for large-scale storage and can store more things on the Metanet network faster. BSv's vision is to create a global open data ledger blockchain that can be used by enterprise applications, and wants to attract companies and applications that want to develop in a standardized and friendly environment. Its development route is the global ledger, against the targetIt is the underlying public chain such as ETH, Cosmos, and EOS. At the same time, BSV claims to embrace supervision and take a compliance route.
However, the price of BSV is called a demon coin because of its "demon increase" several times and serious control. CSW, a community leader who claims to be Satoshi Nakamoto, is also mired in negative reviews. The
fork is the light of freedom in community governance. Different factions adhere to their own routes through forks, and BTC, BCH, and BSV are also exploring on their own paths.
3. BCH forks again
Since BCH officially hard forks into BCHABC and BCHSV on November 16, 2018, BCH has gone through three hard fork upgrades. On November 15th, it will usher in the 7th hard fork, but unlike the usual security transition and upgrade of the community united front, BCH will face the situation of dividing the blockchain into two after this hard fork.
is different from the previous BCH expansion divergence and BSV route divergence. The first two bifurcations belonged to a consensus dispute, but the current BCH bifurcation was a conflict of interests. The reason why detonated the conflict in the community is: BCH’s main development team, BCH ABC, insisted on introducing the "Infrastructure Financing Plan" (IFP) in the November upgrade. It was initiated by some large miners, mainly to solve the funding problems faced by the development team. It is required that 8% of the BCH block reward be allocated to the infrastructure development fund as the key development fund of BCH. The source of
developer income is a common problem in blockchain projects. Miners are clear participants and protectors in the blockchain ecology, and they can obtain system token rewards. Developers are responsible for the upgrade and improvement of the entire public chain, but they cannot get income directly from the system. Currently, developers generally get paid through community donations or commercial investments. The
business investment model has the risk that shareholders obtain the right to speak through shares to control the development team. In order to maintain independence, the BCHABC team rejected the method of commercial investment, but the amount of funds obtained by relying on community donations is limited, and development funds are problematic. It is still a difficult problem shrouded in the road before BCH development.
On January 22 this year, Lebit Mining Pool founder Jiang Zhuoer proposed the "Infrastructure Financing Plan for Bitcoin Cash", proposing to donate 12.5% of the block rewards in the main mining pool over a period of six months Provide sufficient funds for protocol developers to specially set up funds to support BCH infrastructure. Although the plan of
was out of consideration for the long-term sound development of the project, it touched the core interests of the miners. Soon after it was proposed, it was opposed by all members of the community, and ultimately failed. On the other hand, the BCH ABC team insisted on advancing the donation plan, and announced on February 18 that the relevant code had been added to the ABC version 0.21.0 client. This move further intensified the conflicts in the community. Early BCH developer Freetrader took the lead in creating a full node called BCH Node (hereinafter referred to as BCHN) and removed the donation plan in this version. At this point, the BCH community has been split into the core development teams BCHABC and BCHN. BCH will also face a hard fork after block 1605441600.
Just like the two camps competing for the orthodox name of BCH in the last fork war, which chain will inherit the name of BCH this time?
If measured from the perspective of the percentage of computing power, from the BCH block data in the last 7 days, 84.2% of the blocks were dug by the BCHN community, and 0% were dug by BCHA. Unlike the previous battle between BCH and BSV in computing power, the battle was fierce. The strength of the two sides is extremely different this time, and BCHN seems to have a chance to win.
(BCH block data in the last 7 days, the picture is from cash.coin)
If BCHN wins, for project development, short-term benefits give way to long-term development, but the development team funding problems that plague community development still exist. The dispute may cause the future chain to continue to fork. Of course, these are just speculations. It remains to be seen on November 15 where the specific BCH will go.
IV. The impact of the fork
For token holders, on the one hand, according to the BCH bifurcation rules, holding a certain amount of BCH before the snapshot will obtain a corresponding amount of BCH at a ratio of 1:1 after the new chain is generated. A certain value of new chain tokens.
also need to notePlease avoid transferring money during the fork because it may cause loss of coins due to replay attacks. After the BCH hard fork, the new chain and the original chain have the same transaction data, address, private key, and transaction method. One currency before the hard fork will become two types due to the fork. You only need to download the wallet corresponding to the new chain and import the wallet private key of the original chain to get the same amount of new chain currency. Before solving the replay attack problem, if you transfer a BCH before the fork to an address A in your wallet, the corresponding new chain coin in the new chain wallet will also be transferred to address A. Because the coins before the fork are automatically recognized as legal by the two chains after the fork. As long as one transaction is initiated, the other will be synchronized to the blockchain network, and then packaged and processed by the miners, and the transaction will take effect.
For miners, the proof-of-work algorithms used by BCH, BSV, and BTC are all SHA256. The algorithms of the three currencies are common, and the mining machines are common. The computing power flows between the three cryptocurrency networks. Miners pursue more The high-yield motivation makes BTC, BCH, and BSV have similar daily mining returns.
Comparing the currency price trends of previous forks, the token price may still fluctuate sharply in this fork. The fluctuation of currency prices can change the direction of computing power flow. If the sum of the forked currency prices after the fork is higher than the price of BCH itself, it will attract more computing power inflow. If the sum of the currency prices of the two forked coins after the fork is lower than the price of BCH itself, it will increase the outflow of computing power.
On the other hand, the computing power of the original BCH is split between the two chains, which will reduce the computing power of the fork chain, which will also lead to a 51% reduction in attack costs. At this time, the security risk of the blockchain network will also increase.
