While one Bitcoin hard fork has recently been called off, another is almost under way as Bitcoin Cash forks again on November 13. This time, however, the people behind Bitcoin Cash are choosing to undertake a hard fork in order to deal with some crucial network issues.

Teething Problems

Since its inception, BCH has experienced serious issues regarding its difficultly adjustment algorithm and these issues have threatened to bring the network to a standstill. The mining of BCH is invariably linked to BTC mining, and Bitcoin adjusts the difficulty of mining for every sequence of 2016 blocks. This usually takes place roughly every two weeks, with a new block is generated every ten minutes.

However, problems arise when two coins have the same mining algorithm and compete for the same hash power. One coin may tend to dominate and this is detrimental for the weaker, and often, cheaper coin. Miners will migrate to the coin that is the most profitable to mine, with the difficulty remaining the same for 2016 blocks. The network needs increased amounts of time to add new blocks causing the blockchain to freeze, and stop operating completely.

Since August 1, Bitcoin Cash has experienced issues regarding a constant switching between periods of rapid block productions, and periods of stagnation, where it takes hours to find just one block. In order to help alleviate these problems, BCH developers have tended to implement Emergency Difficulty Adjustments (EDAs).

These adjustments can significantly reduce difficulty and result in up to 90 blocks per hour. This has also led to the Bitcoin Cash blockchain adding approximately 8,000 blocks more than the Bitcoin blockchain, and increasing the production of monetary units by 100,000. As a result, Bitcoin Cash has a much higher inflation schedule than that of Bitcoin. By incorporating the use of EDAs, the Bitcoin Cash team have been able to stay afloat as the minority chain of Bitcoin’s SHA 256 mining algorithm. However, this method proved unsuccessful in its ability to stabilize block intervals.

Network Upgrade

As a result, in order to resolve the problem, the Bitcoin Cash developers have decided to undertake another hard fork on November 13. This fork will act as a network upgrade and seeks to change the difficulty algorithm. A number of proposals have been put forward with Tom Zander (Bitcoin Classic), Amaury Séchet (Bitcoin ABC), Neil Booth (Bitcoin Unlimited), and Tom Harding (Bitcoin XT), all coming up with possible solutions. Each proposal consists mostly of mathematical formulas that facilitate the reaching of a stable block interval of 600 seconds via a flexible difficulty algorithm that represents a good trade off between flexibility and stability.

Bitcoin Cash has already benefited from the chaos generated by the failed SegWit2x hard fork and by successfully upgrading the network via a hard fork; BCH will only strengthen its position. BCH emerged as the surprise winner of the SegWit2x drama and jumped from a price of around $630 on November 9 to trade at well over $900 just a day later. The weekend is usually a time of less explosive price action, however, the market is still extremely responsive and BCH has climbed to over $2400 in price and at the time of this writing is trading just above $1650, after increasing in value by over 30% in the last 24 hours. BCH has emerged with an improved reputation and has become more desirable to investors, the Bitcoin Cash team aim to capitalize on this by implementing crucial upgrades on November 13.