A new stillborn crypto?
As expected, the Bitcoin Cash (BCH) hard fork has gone painfully wrong with the creation of 2 chains. Although we will see that the new schism has (even more) damaged BCH’s reputation, it could also be that all this turmoil is finally useless.
BCH gives birth to 2 cryptos, only one of which should survive
Ahead of the Bitcoin Code hard fork, there was „panic on board“: many BCH owners had urgently converged their crypto towards the crypto exchanges that would take over the future duplication. The previous division of BCH, with Craig Wright’s BSV, had indeed given 2 „viable“ cryptos.
This new split between the BCH ABC (BCHA) camp, pro-tax on mined block awards, and the BCH Node (BCHN) camp, anti-tax, occurred at block 661 647on Sunday, November 15.
Bitcoin Cash BCH
The CoinDance site, however, allows us to quickly realize that only BCHN seems to have survived this new division of the Bitcoin Cash blockchain. As we can see below, the computing power (hashrate) of Amaury Séchet’s BCHA clan literally collapsed after the hard fork. Conversely, the BCHN blockchain has seen its hashrate hold and is now back to its pre-fork average, around 1.5 EH/s (exahashes per second).
Computing power on the split blockchains BCHN (in green) and BCHA (in orange)
All this evil for nothing in the end
On the mined blocks side, it is logically the same observation as for hashrate. While the BCHN blockchain has already validated 106 new blocks since yesterday, the BCHA one could only validate 6 blocks.
In fact, the BCHA branch took almost 2 hours to validate its first block (number 661 648), instead of the usual 10 minutes on the Bitcoin Cash network. The sixth – and currently last – block of BCHA (number 661653) was validated more than 5 hours ago at the time of writing this article (see below).
Validation of the BCHN (left) and BCHA (right) blocks just before and after the hard fork
What did Bitcoin Cash gain by being ripped up like that, only to end up with only one viable crypto? Well, well! A great concern for investors, especially institutional investors.
Indeed, while the Grayscale investment fund is recording record after record of interest for its cryptos funds, the one dedicated to BCH is the only one to have decreased.
As a result, for the Grayscale Bitcoin Cash Trust, between the funds under management report of November 9 and November 13, the decrease was 2 million dollars – a completely contained decrease, however. The BCH fund went from $58.8 million to $56.8 million just before the hard fork.
It is therefore clear that with the new arm wrestling that has just taken place in the Bitcoin Cash community, this project has seen its (already bad) reputation be tarnished even more. The only „good news“ is that we shouldn’t see an umpteenth Bitcoin clone continuing, since BCHN seems to be the cryptomony considered as „the real Bitcoin Cash“ by a majority of the exchanges… and should therefore get the official BCH ticker on them.
