I think the split was avoidable. Because bitcoin does not work with Proof of Social Media, but Proof of Work.

It was up to the miners to force big blocks and refuse segwit as a bad scaling solution (my opinion) and they were weak and saw more short term profit in having a split, probably because they were running exchanges too or had friends who did, which meant they could benefit from having 2 coins and people trading them. This was made possible because the community was split by the massive banning policy of r/bitcoin , the miners knew there was going to be financial support of the BCH chain because of the community split that had already occured.

This is a new way to look at BCH: yes it was better than nothing for the big blockers BUT no it was not the best solution.





Now imagine that this is going to happen in the next 5 years:

The miners are not weak anymore and they don't like the split because they are not the same as the ones who split. Since BCH allowed big blocks which requires more long-term investment in hardware, the miners that are investing for the future of BCH are more professionnal than those that only support BTC (RaspberryPi's anyone?).

Honestly ask yourself this question: why would a minority chain survive in a contentious split , when any miner with enough hashpower can anonymously short the chain he dislikes on an exchange, and attack it with a double spend, making a fortune in many ways: with the double spend, with the short position, and with the increased price of the only chain remaining ?

The only explanation I can find is that the majority of the total hashrate (BTC+BCH) likes BCH and does not want to attack it, and would even be ready to defend it if it was attacked. It makes sense when you realize that BCH is the only chain that is going to allow miners to collect massive amount of fees if it succeeds as being on-chain p2p cash, while the Lightning Network will move a big part of the fees to LN Hubs and Watchtowers. Also keep in mind that LN can work on literally ANY blockchain, BTC and all BTC miners could die and LN would still be fine, which shows that it is not actually a layer 2 solution as commonly defined but a side-layer that extract wealth from the original layer if this base layer is artificially capped. In economics when you artifically control the price or scarcity of something, you open the market share to other alternatives that provide a similar service. No one would consider calling this similar service a "layer 2" however.





Now ask yourself this question: we have seen that BCH was able to survive as a minority chain for more than 1 year, do you think BTC could survive as a minority chain given what happened to the big-blocks community and miners: being banned and censored for years and mocked while having to work back from scratch to rebuild all the merchant adoption ?





Imagine that in the coming years the big-blocks miners are going to increase their hashpower and help increase BCH value with good investments that grow adoption like Bitmain and Nchain that invested in yours.org and moneybutton.com , or the incredible handcash.io wallet. All of these investments by miners will cause the flippening to happen and BTC will become the minority chain. Then once the BTC hashrate is low enough, they can 51% attack it with chain reorgs and double spends on exchanges to kill the chain and make BCH even more valuable and make it the only bitcoin. This will cause a lot of pain and losses for BTC holders, like what happened with BitcoinGold recently. Hopefully many will have invested back into BCH when the price ratio starts to show strength for BCH.





My theory is that maybe the war was not avoided despite what most people think, the BCH miners just took a retreat but will come back after BTC with a revenge and it will be bloody.





And I think this is sad because it would have been better to keep the community together (even disagreeing) and the chain as one, and let miners enforce their rules without a split. It would have been better to avoid the pain that will ensue if this theory becomes reality. I hope that in the future that is what is going to happen, and that this split/retreat was just one of the many things that miners have to learn while bitcoin is still young and while they are professionalizing.



