First post here. And I'm a noob at crypto at that.
The situation--in 1 day now--re: BitCoin Cash hard fork has been hard for me, a noob, to understand.
The key player seems to by Jihan Wu from China. As a miner, he controls large portions of the total hasrate. As an investor of Bitmain, he sells the majority of mining ASIC chips.
Jihan's success hinges on the success of BitCoin. The question becomes, then, why would he want to support a fork which can jeopardize the future success of BitCoin?
I found this comment from Reddit the most illuminating so far.
https://www.reddit.com/r/BitcoinMarkets/comments/6ozf11/daily_discussion_sunday_july_23_2017/dklkssh/
This is about the November Segwit2x HF.
Jihan signed onto Segwit2x like others, but he gets his piece (the 2x in block size) last. Theres nothing that forces others to implement this except for their word, which he doesnt trust. Segwit will most likely go through, but how can he force everyone else to keep their part of the bargain? With his mining power of course.
Instead of saying if you guys screw me, I'm going to fork, he says I've already forked and am ready to go RIGHT NOW. BCC forks now, he creates a shitty little alt-coin, and nobody GAF (except for some radicals, which could make it interesting actually). But hes ready now that if anyone looks likes screwing him before November, he could move his mining power in an instant. This also gives time for exchanges etc to carry his coin.
So essentially, nuclear deterrence. And hes moved the rockets onto the launch pads and pulled out the fuse ready to be lit if necessary."
I'll also note that Jihan Wu has a number of ideas about how to innovate on top of BitCoin, a coin he has vast vested interests in:
https://coinjournal.net/bitmain-ceo-jihan-wu-bitcoin-needs-smart-contracts-icos/
ICOs may be useful as a way to fund Bitcoin protocol development in a transparent manner
Wu mentioned smart contracts and Mimblewimble, which is a proposed method of bringing tremendous scale and privacy to Bitcoin, as two examples of features that could be brought to Bitcoin by way of extension blocks
Putting this together, it seems likely that Jihan Wu's motivation is to create a fork of BitCoin which:
- Being built on the tail of the current blockchain gives him as much (if not more) stake in the coin on Day 0
- Gives him more leverage in negotiations with main BTC
- Creates a platform with fewer intersecting interests, so that he can innovate with new features. As Clayton Christiensen advises, for large organizations to innovate, it must have a small independent unit running in parallel that can be free to make decisions without concerns about impacting the overall organization. Jihan could use BCC as a platform to innovate and disrupt BitCoin overall
What does everyone think about this?