The Bitcoin Cash (Bcash) Fork - Damaged Reliability And Additional Risk - Improvements Very Limited

in #bitcoincash7 years ago

Yesterday the hard fork of Bcash took place whereby the maximal block size was increased from 8 to 32 MB and old Bitcoin opcodes were re-introduced. The fork kicked 19% of the nodes off the Bcash network and 17% is still offline. This means that 17% of the users is not able to transact with Bcash at the moment, a big hit for the reliability of BCH as a store of value and medium of exchange as well.

This is exactly the reason why core devs never want to use hard forks to update the network except in an emergency situation. After years of calling the core devs arrogant, slow and even compromised, Bcash proponents can now see that there are good reasons behind it. This is the 3rd Bcash hard fork and two of them didn’t go smoothly (remember the EDA that caused hyperinflation followed by extremely slow transactions?).

Meanwhile BTC is up and running for almost ten years without mayor problems because the devs are conservative and responsible, and amazing scaling tech is being Rolled out as we speak.

I wrote about this subject before the fork:
https://steemit.com/bitcoin/@michiel/bitcoin-btc-vs-bcash-bch-a-closer-look-at-the-transactions-decide-yourself

Bcash big blocks.png
https://twitter.com/btc_manager?lang=en

Was the update of Bcash necessary?

The opcodes implemented in Bcash were removed from BTC because of security reasons. Very serious bugs were found (read here more about it) and there is a fair chance that there are additional hidden bugs too. Since the hard fork yesterday the possibility of a security breach or network failure is greatly increased through these opcodes.

Screen Shot 2018-05-17 at 21.19.31.png
Wow, an update or a time bomb?

The block size increase was simply not necessary at all. The maximum block size might be big, but the actual block size is just over 50 KB, Bcash seems to be not so popular to transact with. This means that they can only fill up 5% of the block space when they would never have increased the block size and still had 1MB blocks like BTC.

Blocks.png

They are only able to fill up 0.625% of the 8MB blocks as they had before the recent hard fork and since they have 32 MB blocks they use only 0.208% of the maximum block space!

blocksize btc vs bch.png
Bitcoin still has by far the biggest actual blocks. Especially when you consider that Bitcoin transactions are way more efficient through Segwit and batching (read here more).

Unnecessary and harmful

The fork was not only very unnecessary, but did harm the network too. Nodes spit off and users are not able to make transactions. This is hilarious, because reliability is one of the (false) selling points of Bcash. As you can see many nodes are still offline and it doesn’t look like they come back online fast, only 2% managed to return within the first day.

Bcash nodes offline.png

Conclusion:

I think this fork was solely designed to create hype and pump (and dump) the Bcash price. The updates were not needed and make the network even less reliable and secure. Furthermore, there was no innovation involved at all, a block size increase can be coded by a child and the opcodes are simply copied / pasted from old Bitcoin code.

Since the track record of Bcash is that 2 out of 3 forks don’t go smoothly and there are giant risks in the base code now, I would strongly advise to dump all of your Bcash now before it is too late.

Bitconnect kept rising and brought great returns for over a year…….

Until it didn’t

Bcash could rise and give great returns for over a year……..

Until it doesn’t

Disclaimer
This is no financial advice, just my view on the market.

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The Bitcoin Cash network was scheduled to upgrade the consensus rules on May 15th, 2018. Their development community performs periodic network upgrades to evolve the network to keep up with their competitive advantage. The upgrade to the consensus rules will raise BCH’s blocksize fourfold from 8 MB to 32 MB and will activate and re-initiate a series of Bitcoin script operation codes.

Additional capacity is always good, to ensure low transaction fees.

As a result, median transaction fees for Bitcoin BTC are now 20-200 times more expensive than for Bitcoin Cash.

Median Transaction Fees:

btw, Bitpay is the #1 payment processor.

So when you're buying something from a Bitpay-enabled merchant (like NewEgg.com, PrivateInternetAccess.com, NameCheap.com, Apmex.com, etc), you should choose the lowest transaction fee in front of you.

And that would be Bitcoin Cash.

So if a coin like Iota and Nano were on Bitpay because they clearly state they plan on adding more coins, I guess both won't be necessary

Great article. I’m in total agreement that this upgrade was unneccesary, furthermore Bcash’s entire existence is unneccesary. The whole network’s existence is an attack on Bitcoin

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Verryy good

While big blocks are ok, how much will they just increase blocks. I guess because full nodes aren't important-it doesn't matter if you can run the nodes. Miners will just run it for you. Remember if bitcoin(cash) become like paypal-roger ver won't mind it and just say to create a new coin. https://coinjournal.net/roger-ver-paypal-acceptable-risk-bitcoin/
Funny thing is why does Bch make fun of LN? Many of the big supporters promote LN on Bch but the users don't like the LN? Honestly I don't dislike Bch-it just their dumb marketing and I guess i will be shiller with them. Won't ever use them-big block are not for me.

Totaly agree. Although I am not personally affected by this fork from what I learned it caused confusion and uncertainty. But I am sure that Roger Ver will find some excuse to justify this fork.

Great post! Resteemed. I agree forking should be for emergencies when a block gets corrupted or there is an error.

Thanks for the update even though i found it hard to understand some part of it but the message was well received.