Nick Szabo is considered only the next to Satoshi Nakamoto and is a pioneer in Bitcoin development. He has described Bitcoin Cash as a “Centralized Sock Puppetry.” Let’s see the reason for him to call Bitcoin Cash a centralized cryptocurrency.

Alibaba Hosting Half of Bitcoin Cash Nodes

It has been found out by researcher Sondre Bjellas that 54% of all the Bitcoin Cash’s nodes are operating in the Alibaba data center. There are around 1242 nodes, and among them, 543 contain the name “Alibaba” in them. Of those 422 run in China, 39 in Hong Kong, 35 in Singapore, 45 in the USA, 1 in Japan and 1 in Germany. Bjellas’ research came after BitGo developer Jameson Loop noticing that half of its nodes were Alibaba servers in China. When we compare this with Bitcoin, only 2% of the nodes are operated by Alibaba servers.

This can pose a high risk due to this centralization, since if the server fails, then the network will come down. Bitcoin Cash is running the risk of one point failure and may go down if the servers fail. It is not decentralized and also verification of transactions is not possible due to non-availability of public nodes. There is also a high risk of double spending happening with Bitcoin Cash.

Nick Szabo Comments on Bitcoin Cash

Nick Szabo commented on this finding by saying that decentralization cannot be marketed well and is not the selling point, but “Cheap payments” are good catchy words for marketing, however, a centralized network is doomed to fail. Nick Szabo also mentioned that in the past there were so many projects like Bitcoin Cash. All of them worked similarly like Bitcoin using cryptography and internet, but they all failed due to the centralization of their network. Below is his quote

[T]here were many precursors to bitcoin which worked similarly – insofar that they used the internet and cryptography to function – but they were all doomed to fail for one reason: they were centralized

Double Signing of Transactions

Bitcoin Cash is at the risk of double spending. This is because sender or receiver cannot verify the transactions and they cannot prevent the double signing of transactions. Due to centralization, the payee is not aware of all transactions. This is due to centralization and also due to larger blocks. The larger the block gets, the more incapable it becomes for all payees to be aware of every transaction. This will lead to double spending and confusion on its network.

Bitcoin Cash should focus on solving these issues and make the network more decentralized rather than focusing on marketing and getting it listed in exchanges. Let’s hope these issues are resolved for better decentralized and secure network.