Both Sides in BCH ‘Hash War’ Are Mining at Major Loss – BitMex Analyst

Miners on both sides of the Bitcoin Cash divide are currently running at significant losses after the hard fork of November 15, crypto experts from BitMex exchange have claimed.

According to analysts from research division of the Hong Kong-based crypto derivative exchange, miners on both the Bitcoin Cash ABC side and the Bitcoin Cash SV were mining at huge losses based on their estimations.

The researchers had set up a network monitoring tool for Bitcoin Cash (BCH), ahead of the highly contentious hardfork which eventually materialized on Thursday.

The monitoring tool which also monitors the Bitcoin [BTC] blockchain showed that miners on the Satoshi Vision side (that is, Bitcoin Cash SV) are burning an estimated $280,000 daily mining on the chain. The chart following the post showed that Bitcoin SV mined coins worth $180,000 daily based on a token price of $100. However, this was canceled out by a mining cost per coin of $249 derived from a daily electric of $458,000.

Bitcoin ABC miners were making bigger losses according to the tweet posted by the BitMex research team. Data from the monitoring tool estimated that the ABC miners were incurring as much as $948,621 daily on electricity charges which brought the mining cost per coin to $527. Valued at $283 per token, the ABC miners earned an estimated $509,400 which left them running a deficit of $439,221daily.

Put in perspective, Bitcoin [BTC] miners are making a tidy $4,084,432 in total profit daily. This stems from a mining cost per coin of $3,341 and coin value of $5,500.

BitMex explained that the figures were based on Bitmain’s Antminer S9 machines and an energy cost of 5 cents per/kWh.

Bitcoin Cash Hash War Continues

According to data from CoinDance, Bitcoin ABC still leads Bitcoin SV but by a much-diminished margin after 292 blocks mined after the consensus change. Bitcoin ABC leads by 18 blocks and is also 59.3 % ahead on Proof of Work.

The Bitcoin Cash SV maintains the support of Coingeek owner Calvin Ayre; its blocks are mined by the Coingeek pool, SV pool, and BMG pool while Bitcoin Cash ABC is supported by Bitmain CEO Jihan Wu and has so far been mined by BTC.com pool, Bitcoin.com pool, AntPool, ViaBTC, and Waterhole.

As Smartereum reported, Bitcoin ABC had led SV by almost 50 blocks earlier but this has been cut short to 18 as at the time of writing. Bitcoin SV’s Craig Wright had earlier cautioned against reaching early conclusions about the hash war as he considers it a “marathon”.

Notable exchanges in support of the hardfork have started distributing the new bitcoin cash tokens. Binance released a notice yesterday that it had delisted the original bitcoin cash (with ticker symbol BCC) and have replaced it with Bitcoin Cash ABC and Bitcoin Cash SV on a 1:1 basis for its loyal customers. It assigned ticker symbols BCHSV and BCHABC respectively to the new tokens and its CEO Changpeng Zhao says there’s no going back on that decision.