Contrary to most people’s perception, the Hashwar is not over. Nov 15th was this first battle and the BCHABC chain claimed that victory. However, as I mentioned as one of the possible strategies in my last post, Bitcoin is Evolving, this was the result of 10-20 percent of the BTC hashpower shifting to the BCHABC chain at the last second to save the BCHABC chain from attack. However, this hashpower is leaving and the BCHSV chain’s percent of the BCH is starting to grow again.

Both BCHABC and BCHSV are operating on their own separate chains, however, the key is to watch what happens when the shifted hashpower from BTC moves back to BTC. We know for certain that the native BCHSV hashpower is 3 times larger than the native BCHABC hashpower and that miners are “greedy” and want to make money. I use the term greedy not as a negative term, but to emphasize an important point, miners are in the business to make money, few care about an ideological war. Most of the hashpower that shifted came from Bitcoin.com mining pool and now that pool has switched it’s users back to mine the most profitable chain, BTC. Now the BCHABC and BCHSV hashrate sits close to equal while BCHABC continues to decline.

A second attack will most likely begin on the BCHABC chain tomorrow that will target the reorganizing of the blocks to cause disruption. A “planned” BCH stress test begins tomorrow and is the perfect time for this attack to start. The attack would work like this, flood BCHABC with transactions that exceed the 32MB capacity, then mine empty BCHABC blocks to minimize economic activity on the chain. The constant reorgs will keep exchanges from settling on a final chain until the war is over. Things get interesting if BTC hashpower returns to support either chain in order to mitigate the effects of the attack.

BCHSV is in this for control of the network. The BCHSV miners have said they don’t agree with the BCHABC rules and will burn money to get this economic control. Just because the BCHABC chain is still alive doesn’t mean that it will survive. The exchanges need to reinstate BCH trading and will not do that if the chain becomes unstable, exchanges and their customers will lose money if the BCHABC chain reorganizes with empty blocks after customers withdrawal or deposit funds.

It will be important to watch the progress of this Hashwar from a long term perspective. When exchanges reinstate withdrawals and deposits the war should be over or close to over. It could take days, months or years. Control of an ideology is at stake.