Bitcoin Cash is doing a hard fork on the 15h of November and panic is settling between the community during the run-up period. Bitcoin Cash is a cryptocurrency that forked away from Bitcoin as a minority (in terms of measurable metrics such as hashrate, transactions, etc.) on the 1st of August 2017. The followers of BCH expected a blocksize increase to happen on Bitcoin and after the lobbying failed another cryptocurrency was given birth.

Bitcoin Unlimited vs Bitcoin SV vs Bitcoin ABC

The Bitcoin Unlimited client implementation offers the most conservative approach to Bitcoin Cash’s future roadmap while the 2 major oppositions namely Bitcoin SV (short for Satoshi’s Vision) and Bitcoin ABC wanted to push a bit more fundamental changes to this digital asset.

The main problem stems from the disagreement on the 2 changes that Bitcoin ABC wanted to push for during the next hard fork date that was predefined during BCH’s creation: Pre-consensus on blocks and Wormhole Tokens.

Craig Wright, nChain’s Chief Scientist and self proclaimed Satoshi (which obviously is not the case as this has been debunked several times), has been heavily disagreeing with Bitcoin ABC’s vision and release his own network implementation under the Bitcoin SV brand with the support of several mining pools and Billionaire investor and miner Calvin Ayre.

The community and support for clients

A good part of the prominent BCH community members pulled their support for Craig Wright including most of the Bitcoin Cash subreddit that has been falsly labeled r/btc and Roger Ver, who also revealed during his video that Bitcoin supporters might have been right to fear continuous hard forks.

Even though outlook for the competing Bitcoin SV implementation looked grim, specially since the leading ASIC manufacturer Bitmain has been in support for Bitcoin ABC, the tides are seemingly turning on several channels.

U.S.-based Poloniex was the first to announce Bitcoin Cash ‘pre-fork trading’ for the upcoming November hard fork. This currently means that the 2 most popular options, namely Bitcoin ABC (BCHABC) and Bitcoin SV (BCHSV) can be separately traded against CUSDC (a stablecoin pegged to USD) after splitting the deposited BCH coins.

[rl_gallery id="4867"]

Even though ‘pre-fork’ trading should never be considered as an accurate indicator for future sentiment, but we found it interesting how BCHSV managed to turn around from a low of $50 and go above $100 in a short time. This also meant that BCHABC dropped from a high of $550 to the current price around $400.

Another very important metric in the fork war is global hashrate, as of the time of writing the article over 61% of the hashrate stands behind Bitcoin SV according to cash.coin.dance:

Exchanges and businesses have so far signaled a mixed response:

Poloniex has been neutral between the 2 major implementations according to how they set up the ‘pre-fork’ trading.

Bitfinex has been neutral according to its statement

Kraken will initially support Bitcoin ABC according to its statement

Binance has been neutral according to its statement

Coinbase seemingly supports Bitcoin ABC according to its statement

A more complete list can be found on https://cash.coin.dance/poli

General sentiment

General sentiment is impossible to measure, but when one visits the most frequented Bitcoin Cash community hubs we can see that panic is slowly settling into the community. The main reason for this is that BCH proponents were previously voicing their support for the ‘hashrate is king’ idea during the Segwit2x drama that hit Bitcoin last year, but now the same attitude would mean the support for Bitcoin SV.

After visiting these hubs we find most posts attacking Bitcoin SV. This is especially ironical as the same attack happens against Bitcoin from these channels even though Bitcoin clearly won the ‘hash war’ against its little lesser used brother and the only reason for why Bitcoin Cash is still alive as a chain using the same mining algo is because BCH altered the difficulty re-adjustment algo from the original one.

So now we face the same situation happening as when the UASF movement dropped the Segwit2x proposal. Is hashrate going to decide or are users and economic nodes more important?

The current Bitcoin Cash / Bitcoin chart also tells us a story:

Even though BCH proponents were awaiting the hard-fork, price has dumped as soon as Bitcoin SV received majority hashrate and investors potentially figured that this will not be an easy decision. Additionally volumes have nowhere been near last year’s levels showing that there is way less interest in BCH currently.

How can you protect your BCH in case there are several forks?

The best way to protect your coins in case there are several competing forks or if there is a potential attack happening on the network is to keep your coins in a wallet where you control your private keys. There is a wide-variety of wallets available under https://www.bitcoincash.org/, but keep in mind that some of those wallets might be light clients meaning that they follow the chain that the service provider wants to follow.

Secondly leaving your coin on an exchange that you know is neutral might be the second best solution for those who don’t feel technical enough to redeem his coins from full wallets later after the forks. This is obviously not advisable, but there are some exchanges which seemed secure enough so far.