While observing the chess game between Chinese miners and Bitcoin core developers I've noticed that the advocates of mining centralization might follow a very smart plan.
It's called divide and conquer.
From wiki:
Divide and conquer: gaining and maintaining power by breaking up larger concentrations of power into pieces that individually have less power than the one implementing the strategy.
Now it's just my theory but consider this:
- Bitman, the largest Chinese Bitcoin miner and mining equipment producer controls Bitcoin Cash - both mining and source code.
- Bitman controls also SegWit2x source code (via btc1).
Currently Bitcoin is upgrading to incorporate SegWit - a backward compatible change in Bitcoin protocol that will allow to it to support new technologies on top of "classic" BTC.
While SegWit is a technology created and tested over 2 years ago, the Chinese miners decided to support SegWit2x - a hard fork, not backward compatible.
Currently Bitmain is fighting with Bitcoin Core - a community of over 100 devs that created SegWit and that look after the Bitcoin code. They are quite conservative, they take their time when implementing new features to the Bitcoin protocol as it seems that safety and stability is their #1 priority.
Bitcoin Core devs are against bigger blocks in Bitcoin as they believe it leads to mining centralization. I believe that this is the reason why Bitman wants to remove Bitcoin Core developers. How? As the title states:
Stage 1 - pump Bitcoin Cash to make it look attractive to investors and to show that it's not gonna end like many of its predecessors (bitcoin unlimited, bitcoin XT, bitcoin classic).
Stage 2 - cause as much FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) in Bitcoin as possible by supporting SegWit2x hard fork - which will divide the community and cause price drop.
Stage 3 - present the Bitcoin Cash as the one and only Bitcoin - and continue to control it 100%.
In case you're wondering - 90% of Bitcoin Cash blocks of were mined by one, unknown miner. He can basically do whatever he wants with all Bcash coins.
source: https://cash.coin.dance/block
In my opinion on November we're gonna have a really big battle in the war that I wrote about four weeks ago. Chinese miners and friends vs Bitcoin Core and the community that support their decentralized vision. Let's hope it's the last one.
