Bitcoin Cash hard-forked from Bitcoin 1 year ago today, August 1st, 2018.
Bitcoin Cash is a very touchy subject thanks to a polarizing, disgusting civil war between the two cryptocurrencies that still rages on today. Most users on the internet call it a shitcoin, that its a scam, etc.
The 'big blockers' were fed up with the multi-year debate on how to scale the blockchain and decided to fork Bitcoin, refusing the Segwit implementation and increasing the block size to 8mb.
The story of the civil war is one ripe with censorship, slander and tons of disinformation.
Bitcointalk.org and R/Bitcoin are/were heavily censored and drove and scaling debate issues toward off-chain and 2nd layer solutions.
Why did this happen? I would strongly recommend all those in the crypto community and invested in Bitcoin to really immerse themselves in the rich history of this controversial debate.
Bitcoin was faced with a couple of options:
Make the trivial code change to increase the tiny 1MB block size which was never meant to be permanent.
Implement a massive modification called Segregated Witness which places the signature data of transactions in a separate place, allowing more space in the blocks. This modification rejects the very definition of a Bitcoin (We define an electronic coin as a chain of digital signatures) and has its own potential flaws.
Note that the block size increase from this radical modification is marginal at best compared to increasing the block size. The justification for implementing this functionality was to fix transaction malleability as a "mandatory" pre-requisite to the Lightning Network.
Also note that this 'mandatory pre-requisite' was a lie. Implementing SegWit does make LN implemenation easier but is by no means required.
Increasing the block size does have consequences as many are quick to point out such as 'centralization'.
Decentralization has become a great buzz word throughout the community without great understanding of its purpose. We only need sufficient decentralization such that we can resist censorship, one of the key principles in the Bitcoin protocol.
An increase from 1MB to 8MB or 32MB is trivial for today's computer's hardware and network bandwidth - especially for the miners who already have built supercomputers.
Another counter to this argument is the claim of necessity for non-mining nodes - that those who keep entire copies of the blockchain on their PCs cannot because the blocks are too big.
First of all, no intent ever existed for nodes to only validate transactions. A full node is a node that mines. Other users can use SPV wallets as mentioned in the whitepaper. This node that only validates transactions can do nothing as the miners control what transactions are entered into a block - these nodes decide nothing.
If one was hellbent on running a non-mining node, the blockchain is only ~137 GB today, and a 1TB hardrive costs around $40 on Amazon.
The blocksize on BCH today is 32MB - I implore all reading this to please go use Bitcoin Cash for yourself and you will be amazed at how fast and cheap the transactions are.
Also, as far as really using Bitcoin I have started to notice some of BCH's biggest critics do not even use Bitcoin on a regular basis. Watch as Roger Ver tries to give Jimmy Song some free Bitcoin live and he's pretty much like 'nah'.
Jimmy is so unwilling to receive some free BTC because this demonstration would have driven home how vastly inefficient the Bitcoin software has become. In the same video Roger also mentions how he argued with a Blockstream supporter who hadn't used BTC in months.
Relating to inefficiency, I keep reading that Bitcoin/Blockstream has some of the best developers in the business. If they were such great developers, then why did they allow the blocks to become full? As a technical lead in software development, less is more. Make the 1 line code change instead of the 4,000+ one to increase performance.
- A counter to this argument is that such a code change requires a hard fork. Ask yourself why is this the case? Other blockchains (like Bitcoin Cash) hard-fork without such drama. Could it be because of the censorship and community manipulation?
This was a catastrophic failure of not only the developers but the entire community. The fees were out of control, payments were taking hours/days. The community allowed themselves to be brainwashed into thinking that they needed SegWit and the unfinished Lightning Network.
Many reasons exist for the price drop in December from 20K but one cannot ignore that $50 fees, slow, unreliable transactions could have been a factor.
Speaking of unnecessary modifications, the Replace-By-Fee modification on BTC is another questionable one. This function allows users to essentially double-spend their funds with a higher fee in order to attempt to speed up their transaction.
RBF breaks zero-confirmation, which allows a user to pay a merchant and walk out of the store without needing to wait for a even a single confirmation. This amazing function leverages the solution to the double-spend problem (first seen, first mined). RBF breaks this function. This protects the merchant as they can be confident that the transaction will be mined in the next block.
For some reason, this modification was introduced instead of simply increasing the block size - because increasing the block size removes the need for this mod in the first place!
(I am told by a friend in Japan that Yodobashi Camera accepts Bitcoin and will make you wait for a confirmation because of this - unfortunately, I have no article to source this, only his words).
SegWit/LN actually drive towards needing 3rd parties to order to route our funds through the network - which blatantly rejects the very title of the Bitcoin Whitepaper - A Peer to Peer Electronic Cash System.
The payment system is no longer Peer to Peer if I need to send my payment to some other entity in order to get to the person/business I want to pay. Another consideration of this is that since channels will contain users' funds, they may be subject to KYC (Know Your Customer) as technically the channels are a custodian of funds.
The SegWit/LN combination cannot alone scale Bitcoin without essentially banking nodes routing everyone's payments. We are not close to a working live solution for Lightning at this time. Believing that the world can wait for this problem to be solved while technology advances at such a rapid pace is arrogant - especially given that an immediate, proven solution (acknowledging its down the road potential issues) is available in the form of increasing the block size.
Today on the anniversary we must recognize how the true intent of the Bitcoin protocol was preserved in another cryptocurrency and that cryptocurrency is named Bitcoin Cash.
P.S. I am tagging this as informationwar. I am doing so because this debate/civil war is a prime example of censorship and propaganda meant to deter the masses from the truth - and this one is so important because of how it affects most users on this platform that exists on a blockchain itself.
