A few weeks ago I wrote a reply to a blog post predicting a BTC death spiral. My article is found here. I went over the points of why the author of the blog post wasn't considering all aspects of the situation. I also provided some charts on how relatively little the impact of the moving hashpower had on BTC and made some predictions. We've now been through a difficulty adjustment on BTC and people are still disagreeing with what I wrote. I want to take a moment and look at the charts since I wrote my post.
A. Hash Rate Chart on August 17th.
from blockchain.info
B. Hash Rate Chart on September 2nd.
from blockchain.info, August 17th in red
C. Difficulty on August 17th.
from blockchain.info
D. Difficulty on September 2nd.
from blockchain.info, August 17th in red
E. BTC/USD Price Chart, 30 days.
from blockchain.info, August 17th in red
F. BCH and BTC Hash Rate Chart, 30 days.
from bitinfocharts.com, August 17th in red
G. BCH and BTC Profitability Chart, 30 days.
from coin.dance, August 17th in red
H. Stats
from coin.dance
I. BTC Median Confirmation Times, 30 days.
from blockchain.info
J. BTC Median Confirmation Times, 1 year.
from blockchain.info
Last 144 BCH Blocks Mined
from coin.dance
Last 1000 BCH Blocks Mined
from coin.dance
Things to Note
When comparing these charts you may note that overall, August was a volatile month for Bitcoin. In spite of the FUD being spread, BTC is more profitable, has hit a new All Time High (ATH), you can also see that Bitcoin's difficulty and hashrate has been recovering and that the volatility in the hashrate averaged out to a rather minor difficulty adjustment. There was a short time period of extended transaction times due to the difficulty that has since been resolved and Bitcoin is currently 24% more profitable to mine. BCH is still heavily centralized, easily manipulated through the Emergency Difficulty Adjustment (EDA), and struggling to hold onto hashpower as BTC soars. BCH has changed difficulty three times in the past week alone, which people attempt to frame as a positive, but with the heavy centralization, it's really just being manipulated. Pull some machines off BCH, let difficulty adjust lower, pop back in as soon as it adjusts to gain easier block rewards, rinse and repeat.
Final Thoughts
I still have not seen anything that has convinced me the people behind BCH had good intentions, particularly when people expressed their concerns with the EDA as a manipulation tool prior to the fork. We will see how it plays out, but for now, BCH is an overpriced altcoin in my opinion. I think over the next few weeks we will see some hash power moving around, a correction in BTC, potentially even enough to allow BCH reach "parity" again. The issue with the representation of parity is still present, with just a few miners taking almost all of the block rewards.