What Will Happen to Bitcoin Cash After the BCH Halving? faast Follow Apr 16 · 3 min read

It’s been a week since the first BCH Halving, and there has been no shortage of controversy since. The apparent exodus of miners to other coins and rumors that even longtime proponents like Roger Ver had stopped mining led to concerns about BCH’s future. In this article we’ll explore the impact of the BCH Halving, what it means for Bitcoin Cash, and potential lessons we can draw from it for the upcoming BTC Halving.

BCH Halving Summary

On Wednesday, April 8th, BCH underwent it’s very first Halving, where the block reward was cut in half from 12.5 BCH to 6.25. Bitcoin Cash is fork of BTC, but it’s halving occurs a little earlier because in 2017, the network temporarily made use of a different algorithm to adjust mining difficulty, which sped up the block creation time. Thus, the BCH Halving occurred on schedule, about 1 month ahead of BTC.

For many in the BCH community this was a highly anticipated event. But after block number 630,000 was mined, the hashrate collapsed. Instead of the normal 10 minutes, it was nearly two hours before block number 630,001 was produced.

Post-halving, the profitability of mining BCH had taken a hit, and miners were beginning to abandon BCH in favor of other cryptocurrencies like BTC, which uses the same mining algorithm. This led to a greater concentration of hashrate distribution, and concerns that a potential 51% attack was now possible.

Block production has sped up considerably, but remains erratic. CasaHODL founder James Lopp observed in a recent tweet that block production has been “ping ponging between producing 1 block an hour and producing 1 block every 2 minutes.” There is speculation that this is due to BCH’s unique custom difficulty adjustment algorithm leading miners to “game the system” by halting mining activity when difficulty increases, and resuming when it drops.

Shortly after the Halving, a controversial article was published on CryptoBriefing stating that prominent BCH supporter Roger Ver had quit mining the asset. Ver himself was quick to dismiss the article as “fake news” and posted a detailed rebuttal of the claim, and gave his thoughts on the Halving.

What does this mean for the future of Bitcoin Cash?

To be clear, none of this means that BCH is dying. Prices have remained relatively stable since the BCH Halving, and the hashrate has started to go back up. But for BCH to grow, miners will have to come back at some point. The good news for BCH holders is that there is reason to believe this will happen next month.

Many miners switched to mining BTC after the BCH Halving because it was more profitable. But after BTC’s own Halving, bitcoin’s price will be the determining factor for whether many miners continue operations. If BTC’s price does not rise fast enough, a significant percentage of miners could be forced to cease operations, or move on to altcoins. Some miners will most likely switch back to BCH.

The past two Halvings for BTC have resulted an enormous price increases approximately 12–18 months later. Since this is the first BCH Halving, it remains to be seen whether or not Bitcoin Cash will follow this pattern. If it does however, there could be a unique window of time to take a position at a low price.

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