The confrontation between Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash is increasingly reminiscent of Swift's story of the war between the blunt ends and the sharp ends. The long, exhausting and completely pointless struggle for the right to break an egg with a blunt or sharp end is too similar to the debate over whose cue ball is steeper, which the crypto community has been watching for six months now.
Recall that with the growing popularity of Bitcoin and the increase in the number of payments, block sizes significantly slowed down the speed of transaction processing. To solve this scalability problem, two methods have been proposed. Unable to find a compromise, the development team split into two ideological camps.
The first team decided to develop a new Segregated Witness (SegWit) protocol.
Another group of developers led by Amaury Sechet announced that they would maintain the same blockchain structure, but increase the block size to 8 MB.
In May, representatives of both sides held talks in New York. The result was a decision that everyone was happy with to support SegWit, subject to increasing the SegWit Bitcoin block size to 2 MB, which would have made it possible to lower fees and increase network performance.
But this meeting and decision (New York Agreement, NYA, SegWit2x) were in no way consistent with the interests of Adam Back. Firstly, he did not take part in it. Secondly, he does not agree with the decision made. Essentially, this arrangement behind his back took away his complete control and placed decision-making power in other hands. Adam Back had no fundamental objections to increasing the block size. But, given the politically unfavorable situation for him, a powerful campaign against increasing the block followed on his part.
As a result, the hard fork still happened at the end of last summer. The result was Bitcoin Cash, with an increased block volume of up to 8 MB and faster transactions.
Despite the grandiose plans of the developers, the project initially had a large number of opponents.
Today, a serious political struggle for power over Bitcoin is gaining momentum.
On the one hand, claims to leadership come from Adam Back and his Blockstream. This company funds the development of the main Bitcoin client and protocol. The same one that has been working since 2008.
On the other hand, the libertarian Roger Ver, the Chinese miners and the heads of large companies like Coinbase and Shapeshift. They compete with Back and support Bitcoin Cash.
The tension between Bitcoin (BTC) and Bitcoin Cash (BCH) supporters is increasing every month. This confrontation led to the fact that the head of the Litecoin project, Charlie Lee, was unable to maintain a policy of non-interference... Buterin did not remain indifferent to what was happening, and left sarcastic comments on his Twitter, watching the dispute between the founding fathers.
But this did not sober up the hotheads at all. On the contrary, the same Roger Ver, at every opportunity, tries to tell how the “correct” coin BCH outperforms the completely unpromising BTC. It seems that this has already turned into some kind of obsession. Here, for example, is Ver's latest interview, which he gave to a Bloomberg journalist:
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CEO Bitstamp Nejc Kodrik thus described the platform’s position in relation to the “bitcoin war”: “Coca-Cola invented a sweet, dark, fizzy drink, then Pepsi copied 90-95% of Coca-Cola and began to bottle their drink in larger volumes. They did a heavy marketing campaign to promote Pepsi, and a group of people flocked to their camp saying they liked Pepsi better. Most likely, something similar is happening here. We have two cryptocurrencies with similar technologies, each with active, strong and often aggressive supporters. Our business is to enable users to trade what they want. We do not join any of the parties."
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