All you need to know about BCH hardfork before November 15

The difference in opinions of community members has resulted in multiple attempts to create crypto assets by the means of forks and splits. Bitcoin Cash (BCH) is scheduled for an upcoming fork on November 15 splitting the network into two separate blockchains. It will be a hard fork. The fork is announced by Bitcoin marketer and supporter, Roger Ver who announced on Twitter and informed the fork to take place this month. A fork is seen as a major change in the blockchain protocol and a crucial event for the Bitcoin community. A hard fork is an update or change in the cryptocurrency protocol that is not backward compatible. Meaning that all nodes should update the change otherwise a split may occur resulting in the creation of new crypto- token. Bitcoin forks have become so common since its launch in 2009 that gave birth to Bitcoin XT, Bitcoin Unlimited, and Bitcoin Cash fork.

Once again the community, miner, and developers could not settle on a common consensus and thus hard forking the BCH blockchain. Community leaders along with the key developers and miners take decisions on the future of a blockchain such that blockchain grows. It can introduce new implementations in the codes. The hard fork of BCH will split into two separate chains. Eventually one of these will become a dominant chain.

Disagreement of opinion

IFP implementation

IFP refers to the Infrastructure funding plan proposed by a team of developers at Bitcoin Cash ABC. Amaury Sechet, lead developer at BitcoinCash ABC said that they lack in terms of resources required to create new software for BitcoinCash (BCH). According to him, a new implementation should be introduced under which 8% of the BCH reward (which is 6.25%) enjoyed by a miner after successfully mining a block of BitcoinCash should be given to the developer’s team. These funds will be used for further development of the blockchain. This is the IFP implementation. The developers working on the project wanted a regular source of financial benefit to enhance project competency and long performance. A similar IFP model is followed by ZCash and DASH.

The other side of the story

Bitcoin Unlimited and Roger Ver completely disagree with the IFP implementation. They think that this will give more powers to the developer’s team and a time will come when developers will take over all the decisions of the decentralized ecosystem. This will also reduce the reward percentage for the miners. As per Bitcoin Cash ABC, if miners refuse to transfer 8% of their reward for the regular development of AVC protocol, it will adversely affect the future of blockchain mining. If a miner does not want to share its 8% revenue as transaction fees they will be rejected by the Bitcoin Cash ABC. This will make Coinbase rules useless.

This divided the BCH community into two groups and a split is being announced as both could not land a decision suiting both the parties. Since the Bitcoin ABC full node implementation is widely used and recognized it is quite possible that it will likely prevail. Although the suspense is resting on the name and would be bestowed to a blockchain with a higher price.

NilacTheGrim is a member of the BCH community and has been at the forefront of opposing the BCH fork. In his blog post, ‘On Why Amaury Should Resign’ he called both the arguing parties selfish. He said that this situation is not the dream of BCH. If not ABC, any other community leader would have funded BCH. Amaury’s adamant behavior to stand firm on his IPF implementation resulted in the unnecessary bifurcation of BCH. This diminished the efforts put in by the other developers in the community.

How to prepare for the fork?

For users running node

The split in BCH blockchain will make alternative node software incompatible with the Bitcoin Cash network. Users can make technical specifications by upgrading the software to Bitcoin ABC 0.22.0 or any later versions and test the node before November 15. No specific upgraded configuration is required for non-mining nodes.

For users holding tokens

The BCH is less than two weeks away. Supporting or not, users may want to prevent loss of tokens from wallets and exchanges during chain split. Token holders might want to move BCH to Electron Cash and then claim the new coin if at all distributed.

Response of exchange and wallets

Most of the wallets & exchange platforms have announced to suspend their services at the time of fork. This is the most common practice to prevent funds loss and fraudulent activities.

Ledger announced to discontinue providing BCH services until it is clear which of these chains will be more stable.

• Coinex provided its users an option to convert BCH into BCHA (Bitcoin ABC) and BCHN (Bitcoin cash node chain) at 1:1 ratio.
• OKEx will be more likely to adopt a chain that will more comply with the market norms.
• Coinbase and Binance have revealed intentions to support the Bitcoin Cash fork. It is still unclear which blockchain they will support but it seems the ball is likely to fall under BCHABC’s court. Also, before the discord actually happens, BCHABC had announced a business fundraising drive in March 2020 to fulfill their development needs.

What is Bitcoin Cash?

BHC is an updated version of Bitcoin segregated from the original Bitcoin in 2018. Community members see it as a solution to the scaling problems that have been plaguing BTC for years. Bitcoin underwent another split, SegWit2x hard fork in November 2017 giving birth to BitcoinSV. The fork was an update to improve the speed of BTC transactions and increasing block size to lower the fees. The present split will occur as a result of disagreement on IFP implementation.

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