The Opposition Towards Bitcoin ABC's Proposed Upgrade Changes

On August 8, the Bitcoin ABC development team published an announcement regarding the November hard fork changes with plans to finish the latest codebase by August 15. The proposal falls in line with the ABC developer’s upgrade timeline and contains about five different changes that will soon be ready for testing.

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Bitcoin ABC Publishes Plans and Consensus Changes for the Upcoming BCH November Upgrade

The Bitcoin Cash community has plans to upgrade the network once again with consensus changes this November. Just recently, news.Bitcoin.com reported on Bitcoin ABC developers announcing they will be releasing new code on August 15th for testing. On August 8, the ABC development team revealed the changes they plan to add to the 0.18.0 codebase that includes about five new features. The ABC developers say there’s only one week left before the official code-completion date and they want to remind and update the BCH community with the latest developments.

The new changes that have been completed and will undergo testing on August 15 include:

Canonical transaction ordering (more info here)

Enforcement of minimum transaction size of 100 bytes to prevent attacks on the Merkle tree (more info)

Activation code and implementation for OP_CHECKDATASIG and OP_CHECKDATASIGVERIFY (more info)

Make push-only mandatory for scriptsig (more info)

Another change that is currently still in progress, but expected to be ready by next week, is a modified fee structure which would allow a significant decrease in transaction fees. ABC programmers explain that a modified fee structure is not necessarily a strict consensus change, but nevertheless will be included in the 0.18.0 version. In addition to the announcement, the team also published two specifications for the overall hard fork, and for OP_CHECKDATASIG and OP_CHECKDATASIGVERIFY.

Craig Wright: ‘If a Certain Developer Wants This, Then We Will Fund Replacement Developers’

Of course, the announcement from Bitcoin ABC sparked a bunch of controversy due to certain additions within the code changes — most notably the activation of OP_CHECKDATASIGVERIFY (CDSV). Adding the change could allow developers to create binary contracts using the BCH chain, and Bitcoin Unlimited’s lead developer Andrew Stone has been researching and working on implementing the opcode in order to make bitcoin scripting applications more versatile.

One of the most vocal individuals against adding the CDSV opcode is Nchain’s chief scientist, Craig Wright, who spoke out in opposition against the opcode addition right away. Wright explains to his Twitter followers that the opcode is not going to happen, while tagging Coinngeek’s Calvin Ayre and Viabtc’s Haipo Yang in the post as well.

“OP_CHECKDATASIGVERIFY is not happening — If a certain ABC developer wants to push this, then we will just fund replacement developers — Trust me — There are others,” Wright explains after the Bitcoin ABC code announcement.

Miners vote — Think we are not serious. Watch the Axe fall.

There’s been some opposition to Wright’s objection as he already had been arguing with developers about ideas like pre-consensus. When Wright spoke out against pre-consensus, Coingeek’s Calvin Ayre took his side and announced a day later that Coingeek would not participate in any “risky” protocol changes. Coingeek’s mining pool commands a hashrate of around 21 percent of the network over the last seven days. On Thursday, Nchain’s Wright says to his Twitter followers that just like the Nchain team, his friend Calvin Ayre will not allow developers to treat Bitcoin like a toy.

“And like us, Calvin Ayre will not settle for a devs plaything,” Wright emphasizes.



The original base protocol — No experiments — Unlimited unbounded scale.

Will Bitcoin Cash Miners Weigh in on the CDSV Opcode Subject?

Of course, many trolls from the core camp have been trying to use the infighting to cause disruption among the BCH community. Bitcoin XT’s lead developer Tom Harding notes this observation on Thursday saying, “Underway: obvious campaign to sow discord among BCH supporters — Sorry trolls, Bitcoin is Byzantine fault tolerant.” So far there’s been a lot of debate about this subject, but at least BCH supporters know that the subjects are being discussed, rather than one side of the discussion being purposely suppressed by so-called ‘thought leaders’ and forum administrators.

So far there hasn’t been an official response from Coingeek like the one shared the other day concerning pre-consensus changes. Moreover, Calvin Ayre has not said anything yet in regard to the CDSV opcode subject on Twitter, so people will be waiting to hear him weigh in on the CDSV topic. Viabtc’s Haipo Yang made an interesting statement on Twitter following the heated debate on Friday and said:

We need to stop the regular hard fork of Bitcoin Cash. We need stable Bitcoin protocol specification, we need multiple implementations — There should not be dev decide but miner vote.

However, other miners have not made any statements for or against the idea of implementing CDSV. Wright says he cares deeply about the project and people better not get in his way when it comes to protecting the original Bitcoin protocol.

“I care about making bitcoin THE global currency,” Wright details this Friday.

The original Bitcoin protocol — Not a social experiment. If you get in my way… Watch the juggernaut roll!

What do you think about the consensus changes Bitcoin ABC has proposed? What do you think about Nchain’s Craig Wright weighing in on the subject? Let us know what you think about this topic in the comment section below.

Images via Shutterstock, Bitcoin ABC logo, and Pixabay.

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