Jihan Wu of Bitmain, one of the biggest miner with one million BCH coins, has retweeted a translated statement made in Chinese spaces where he says he suspects Craig Wright (CSW) is a Blockstream spy. Jihan Wu says:

Tensions are running high in Bitcoin Cash where a chain-split fork is now near certain as nChain’s new client, BitcoinSV, has launched.

All went to the code to see how they addressed certain technical limits to allow the client to handle 128MB blocks, but to their disappointment they found out that BitcoinSV still has the 32MB limit.

The only change they seem to have made is the removal of replay protection, meaning transactions in BCH can be made again in BSV or whatever they’ll call BitcoinSV.

The solution to that problem would be easy at an individual level. After the fork you simply send your BCH to a BCH address and then send it again to a BSV address. For exchanges it might cause problems, which may mean none of them lists BSV although there may well be a repeat of Poloniex’s surprise listing of the chain-split ETC in 2016.

The one BSV coder they have hired, Dan Connolly, said this release was rushed out to meet deadlines after some expressed grave concerns regarding this:

Red is what has been removed, green is what has been added. Except for the comment, the only thing that has been added here is “return false,” which basically means no replay protection.

The coder says this is a quick fix and in his to do list is “remove replay protection properly.” While some other BSV supporters say increasing the limit to 128MB is just a config file change, but have not explained why this super easy change wasn’t made.

Connolly hasn’t said it is easy. He appears to just be doing his job, but the problem is that once the rushed BSV node client launches, any bug will most probably be exploited, and pointing fingers there would be difficult because it may be Bitcoin Core supporters, BitcoinABC supporters, perhaps even eth devs, maybe even academics, in effect, the entire world.

So any “quick fix” might not do much damage because there would probably be peer review BU style. That’s one example of how hashrate doesn’t always matter too much because there are many complex aspects to bitcoin’s decision making with decentralized public blockchains, like BCH, having no one group or individual that yields full power.

For example, “we kill any small hash exchange… It is BCH – there is NO split,” Craig Wright says. The problem there is that someone like Coinbase, for example, would most probably not run BitcoinSV, but only BitcoinABC. Thus their node knows only of the chain that is compatible with BitcoinABC, which SV isn’t.

As such, hashpower has no say whatever as far as their node is concerned. There would instead be two chains, each with their own miners. They don’t merge, like BCH didn’t merge with BTC, nor ETC with ETH. So the SV miners have no say as far as exchanges and ABC nodes are concerned.

Wright further says “Devs do as they are paid to do BY MINERS!” But in open source code, some devs do whatever they want, some are paid by businesses, some do it voluntarily, some just see what other devs are doing for any bugs they can disclose, some are hackers looking for any exploit to steal money and so on.

We thus here have five components. There are the holders first and foremost who decide what to sell and buy, the businesses and exchanges which give them a market to sell and buy, they in turn are closely related to what node they run, then there are the devs that provide the node, and then finally there are the miners who manufacture a product to sell.

Wright further says: “You scale or we orphan your nodes,” but BitcoinABC stands for Adjustable Blocksize Cap. One of their proposal, canonical ordering, is to allow for increased scaling through parallelization.

That’s some complex technical stuff requiring some fine maths while BitcoinSV can not even properly remove a replay protection before launching their client.

“I will not support nChain in any way for as long as they are behaving like stupid, short-sighted children,” Jonathan Toomim, a respected miner-dev and a very long time Bitcoin Cash supporter, says.

He further says he doesn’t have any strong views save for the above. He’ll go with either BU or BitcoinABC depending on which most go with.

BU is currently having a members vote on some of the ABC proposals, like canonical ordering, with a technical debate still seemingly on-going in Bitcoin Cash.

Whatever differences, however, it appears that everyone of matter, whether from BU, ABC or otherwise, echoes Toomim’s sentiment, so it looks unlikely anyone will go with BSV.

That should make a potential split easier, with Craig Wright on one hand, and everyone else on the other. Yet there are some three more months to go, so how all this develops remains to be seen.

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