BCH Hard Fork Controversy Heats Up as Bitcoin Unlimited Pleads For Truce

Bitcoin Cash is at a civil war of sorts. As November approaches, the community is divided and tension intensifies as the developers of Bitcoin ABC and nChain are planning a hard fork. However, it looks like Bitcoin Unlimited is interested in being a neutral party during this conflict.

The developer Andrew Stone, from Bitcoin Unlimited, has submitted a proposal on the Bitcoin forum to be a broker for this conflict, which might split the Bitcoin Cash network in November.

About the BCH Hard Fork War

The conflict has been largely waged between Bitcoin ABC and nChain. Bitcoin ABC is led by Amaury Séchet, known as the “benevolent dictator” of the Bitcoin Cash and nChain is led by a scientist called Craig Wright.

Bitcoin ABC has proposed some new changes on the BCH protocol and the nChain developers argue that these changes are not ethical and go against the spirit of the Bitcoin white paper. The idea is that nChain will release its own full node BCH client, which will be called Bitcoin Satoshi Vision (SV). This update will introduce a block size of 128MB quadrupling the current one, 32MB. This move will potentially split the Bitcoin Cash network in two.

Bitcoin Unlimited’s Proposal

To stop these fights and prevent the hard fork split, Stone has proposed BUIP098 as the way out. This code will adopt the changes from both companies and the node operators will be able to change their signal to use both of them. The features would, then, be activated on an individual basis.

Stone believes that it is highly ironic that both groups reject each other’s changes while they are fully compatible. Bitcoin Unlimited is trying to broker the conflict, but both sides have been rebuking its efforts, which has led him to believe that this a dispute of power and ego rather than technical merit.

As even the smallest changes have been rejected, he concludes that the two groups are simply compromised in not agreeing at all, which is regrettable, and things will probably not improve if the network splits.

At the moment, a little bit less than a third of the network is operated by Bitcoin Unlimited clients. Two-thirds are using Bitcoin ABC instead. There is also a variety of other clients, but they all only amount to 2% of the network.

It is important to remember that nChain has not released Bitcoin SV yet, so it will probably take its share of the market. However, nChain has a large miner support. CoinGeek, the largest Bitcoin Cash mining pool in the world, is openly supporting nChain’s vision for the new BCH protocol and has affirmed that it will run Bitcoin SV once implemented. At the moment, Bitcoin Unlimited has about a quarter of the BCH hash rate.

If nothing changes soon, the most possible result is that the network will split and we will see a new hard fork and new tokens being created in November.