The creator of the world’s second-largest cryptocurrency has weighed in on the burgeoning hard fork dispute within the Bitcoin Cash community.
Writing on Twitter, outspoken Ethereum creator Vitailk Buterin said that the Bitcoin Cash community should avoid the temptation to compromise with nChain chief scientist Craig Wright, whose firm has more or less threatened to launch a competing BCH fork over a disagreement with Bitcoin ABC, whose software implementation it the most widely-used BCH full node client.
“The BCH community should NOT compromise with Craig Wright to ‘avoid a split’ and should embrace it as an opportunity to conclusively ostracize and reject him,” he said. “Bitcoin Craig (BCC) can go take the ticker symbol from the now-defunct cryptocurrency to which it is a fitting successor.”
Buterin, of course, is referring to Bitconnect (BCC), the once-prominent cryptocurrency that was ultimately exposed as a Ponzi scheme. Just this week, a high-ranking Bitconnect promoter was arrested in India as part of a wider investigation into the scam, which cost investors billions of dollars in notional value.
As CCN reported, Bitcoin ABC intends to activate several new features during a scheduled BCH hard fork in November, including canonical transaction ordering and two opcodes that will make it easier to implement a smart contract framework on the Bitcoin Cash network.
NChain, with backing from major Bitcoin Cash mining pool CoinGeek, plans to release a BCH full node implementation — dubbed Bitcoin SV (short for “Satoshi Vision”) that is incompatible with the new Bitcoin ABC client, laying the groundwork for what promises to be an incredibly-disruptive network split in November if the two sides do not reach an agreement on the future of the BCH protocol.
This isn’t the first time Buterin has sparred publicly with Wright. In addition to numerous spats on Twitter, Buterin took aim at Wright in-person at the Deconomy 2018 conference in Seoul, questioning why “this fraud” was allowed to speak at the event, a reference to the fact that Wright has in the past claimed to be Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto. Wright, in turn, called Buterin “Bevis,” an allusion to the character from the “Bevis and Butthead” cartoon.