In light of the upcoming Bitcoin Cash (BCH) hard fork on November 15th, we would like to share our plans for the BTC.com wallet, mining pool, and other services.
On November 15th, a Bitcoin Cash hard fork will take place. As part of a scheduled protocol upgrade, Bitcoin Cash hard forks twice a year. We are prepared to offer full support to our users during and after the Bitcoin Cash hard fork, and all BTC.com services will operate as usual.
We are positive about the future of Bitcoin Cash, as this November’s upgrade will enable Bitcoin Cash to further improve its scalability, making it suitable to be used as a global, peer-to-peer digital currency. The upgrade also offers new tools for the developer community to create a strong ecosystem.
What is a hard fork?
A hard fork is a blockchain software update that is incompatible with the previous version.
Sometimes it does not create a new coin, as the whole network upgrades their software, just like it happened this last May. However, on November 15th the upgrade may be a contentious hard fork, because the community has not reached consensus. The proposals for the network upgrade by Bitcoin ABC and Bitcoin SV are not compatible. This incompatibility may result in a network split, with two different blockchains, which would follow their own rules.
What will BTC.com do?
The BTC.com mining pool, wallet and block explorer are currently running Bitcoin ABC 0.18.3. After the network upgrade, all BTC.com services will continue running Bitcoin Cash (Bitcoin ABC).
The BTC.com pool will temporarily suspend Bitcoin Cash payout from 16 November until the situation becomes stable (a day or two). As for the BTC.com wallet, we will allow users to make transactions during this period. During the upgrade, we will closely monitor the Bitcoin Cash network and keep our users updated. Follow us on Twitter to get all the latest updates!
We can assure to all our BTC.com users that our products and services will remain safe and available, but we recommend to follow these best practices below!
What should wallet users do?
As part of your private key management plan, please make sure that you have backed up your private keys. With your private keys, you are always in full control of your funds held in the BTC.com wallet. If both Bitcoin Cash versions would remain to exist, our users may be able to claim their other fork coins.
BTC.com believes to give full freedom to its users, therefore we won’t stop you from doing transactions during the hard fork. However, we strongly recommend NOT to transact Bitcoin Cash shortly before and a few days days after the hard fork. This is to prevent a potential replay attack (see below).
What are replay attacks?
This Bitcoin Cash hard fork does not have protection against replay attacks, meaning that a malicious party may copy the transaction you made on one BCH chain and re-send it (re-play) on the other BCH chain, which may lead to losses of your other BCH coins.
To prevent our users from losing any Bitcoin Cash, we urge you to NOT transact Bitcoin Cash right before and a few days after the BCH hard fork. Once we can establish that there is no more risk for replay attacks, we may offer a recovery tool to extract your fork coins.
This is an exciting time and we are all part of new, open financial system. Thank you for using our products, you are always safe with BTC.com!