November 15 at 21:02 Moscow time, the Bitcoin Cash blockchain officially split into two separate networks and two competing cryptocurrencies. An iteration of the protocol that directly opposes the updates implemented with the support of the long-dominant implementation of the Bitcoin ABC project has been dubbed “Satoshi's Vision” or Bitcoin SV.
Despite the fact that many were waiting for the so-called “hash war”, at the moment the two chains are mining blocks in their own networks, and the threats of cross-chain sabotage previously voiced by Bitcoin SV supporters have not been implemented.. The Bitcoin ABC team also refrained from any hostile action.
At first, Bitcoin ABC was the only Bitcoin Cash platform to successfully create new blocks and confirm transactions after the hard fork.. However, two blocks later, at 21:29, Bitcoin SV created its first block, which was mined by the Mempool mining pool.. Subsequent blocks created SVPool and Coingeek, mining pools Bitcoin.com, BTC.com and Antpool also kept the ABC network running.
At the time of publication, according to the Bitcoin Cash monitoring site Coin Dance, Bitcoin ABC is ahead of Bitcoin SV by 50 blocks.
What happened
So far, most of the blocks mined on the Bitcoin ABC network have had over 1,000 transactions, although Blockchair has seen a significant drop in block size and transaction count since 23:48.
Hours before the hard fork was activated, mining pools supporting the Bitcoin SV roadmap controlled most of the Bitcoin Cash network.. However, according to data from Coin Dance, Bitcoin ABC now controls the vast majority of the network's hashrate.
One of the events that caught the attention of the community during yesterday's hard fork was the announcement by mining pool Bitcoin.com that all of its hash power used to mine Bitcoin will be temporarily directed to mining Bitcoin ABC blocks.
While the post drew backlash from those who argued that the organization had no legal right to redirect hash power, according to Bitcoin.com, starting at 8:30 p.m., the mining pool has steadily reallocated hash power in support of the Bitcoin ABC blockchain.
Bitcoin.com claimed that 4218.89 Ph/s hashing power is used to mine blocks on the Bitcoin ABC network, although just a day before it was approximately 240.00 Ph/s. Later, the indicator returned to this figure.
What will happen next
As you might expect, the existence of two Bitcoin Cash chains has left many questions, most notably as to whether one of the chains will fall under the onslaught of the other.. However, at the moment, an equally interesting issue is the large burst of activity that occurred a few minutes after the network fork.
The GIF above captures transactions that, according to the BlockDozer website, were sent to the network in real time at 21:11.
Who caused this burst of transactional activity and for what purpose is still unknown, but the possibility of another spam attack in an attempt to cause congestion in one of the networks still exists.
In addition, during yesterday's day, there were serious fluctuations in the price of Bitcoin Cash on various cryptocurrency exchanges.. Depending on current hash power support and software adoption by users, prices may continue to fluctuate, but given the uniqueness of the unfolding scenario, it is difficult to predict anything at this time.