After months of debating and anticipation, the hard fork of Bitcoin Cash is officially here. The code for the fork has been activated. As the NextWeb reports:
“The Bitcoin Cash blockchain is now split in three separate networks, each with its own set of rules and governing principles: one developed by Bitcoin-ABC, one developed by Craig Wright’s blockchain research unit nChain, and one developed by Bitcoin Unlimited.”
At this point, it is not clear which iteration of the coin will be the dominant one. The other option is for the two chains to co-exist.
According to Coindesk:
“The last “common block” among bitcoin cash miners was #556,766, mined by SVPool. As of press time, Bitcoin.com – which is supporting Bitcoin ABC – had mined a new block, signifying that the two chains have divided into two, according to data from Coin.Dance.”
The two competing versions of the network are the Bitcoin’s Satoshi Vision (SV, for short) and the Bitcoin ABC. Bitcoin SV is all for increasing the block size from the current 32MB to 128MB and not implement the changes offered by Bitcoin ABC, but just restore some of the “old” or retired code from the first protocol of Bitcoin.
The opponent to this proposition is Bitcoin ABC. The supporters of ABC vouch for the use of new additional code that will help increase the interoperability of cryptocurrencies, as well as for implementing certain technical upgrades to the entire network.
As a result of the Bitcoin Cash’ hard fork, the market cap of the entire cryptocurrency market has dropped by more than 15% for a very limited span of time. The community is once again divided. Bitcoin Cash was also brought up to the market by a hard fork of Bitcoin and is currently the fourth largest cryptocurrency by market cap with value of $7.3 billion, according to CoinMarketCap data.