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Comment by jstanley | Hacker News Reader

Meanwhile, it's 12 hours since Bitcoin Cash actually mined a block.

The only reason the price is so high is because people can't make transactions to send their BCH to exchanges.

EDIT: My mistake. Originally said 20 hours. It's only 12.

The delay in mining was required to trigger drastic difficulty reduction (20%). More details at https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/6r33fz/difficulty_adju...

I'm confused. You're saying that the delay was intentional?

It's super unprofitable to mine BCH right now, at current exchange rates (assuming you could even sell BCH, which you can't). Miners stopped to wait for it to become profitable again, due to BCH's special difficulty adjustment. Details: https://medium.com/@jimmysong/bitcoin-cash-difficulty-adjust...

Okay that sounds more reasonable. My original thought was that it's not very decentralized if all the miners can agree to stop mining at any point. Economic reasons seem much more reasonable.

It's not very decentralized. According to https://cash.coin.dance/blocks ten of the 16 blocks so far on this fork have been mined by "Genesis Block 269-273 Hennessy Road Wan Chai Hong Kong", 3 have been mined by ViaBTC, and only 3 by someone else. These two pools together have around 80% of the hash rate on this fork.

Even if they could make transactions, the exchanges aren't accepting deposits of BCH. The only exception I'm aware of is ViaBTC and apparently they want 20 confirmations (about a week at current hashrate, I think). The BCH market cap that's quoted in this article is rather misleading because nearly all of those coins simply cannot be sold on exchanges currently.

Regarding the question in the replies: when the fork happened, all the BTC in the exchanges at the time split off into an equal amount of BCH. The various BCH/BTC markets are effectively trading people's claims to portions of those much smaller pools of BCH that were already on the exchange when it forked. (Those claims can't necessarily be converted into actual BCH yet either; for example, Kraken isn't currently allowing BCH withdrawals.)

Wait a minute, what? How can Kraken claim to have a BCH/BTC market if you can’t deposit BCH and sell them?

For BTC they already hold pre-fork.

They are just trading their internal accounting of BCH, by crediting BTC holders with BCH. Nothing is hitting the blockchain.

Bitfinex did this too, but royally screwed up: http://hackingdistributed.com/2017/07/29/bitcoin-impending-a...

This also conveniently prevents people from dumping BCH to drive down the price. The number of confirmations required by most exchanges in order to guard against double spending Sybil attacks will take days. The price will continue to rise as it makes its way into the news. By the time people can dump their BCH it is likely there will be substantial momentum behind it. The launch has been brilliantly orchestrated.

But the amount of existing BCH is so high, that the moment it starts reaching the exchanges the dump will be earth-shattering. If only there was a way to short BCH... :(

A short is just a loan and a contract. If you can find your own counterparty, you might be able to do it.

I thought about this, but who would make a loan to somebody they don't know without a platform with sufficient guarantees?

And anyway, it would need to be BCH which is already on one of the few exchanges that allow to trade it, as it's impossible for the time being to move it around (which is the very reason why the price is high there right now). Not very likely.

On the other hand, if anybody who is long on BCH wanted to talk about a future or an option, I'm all ears :D

Sufficient guarantees are just a contract. The result is the same either way if something goes wrong -- you take the counterparty to court.

In this case, by "sufficient guarantees" I meant the automation of exchanges, where you need to have collateral to trade on margin, and the lender is automatically repaid (unless something goes very wrong) without courts.

So then write a contract that requires collateral. This is what escrow exists for.

Block monitors for BitcoinCash https://cash.coin.dance/ https://blockchair.com/bitcoin-cash/blocks http://blockdozer.com/insight/

The popular press are crypto-illiterate.

2 blocks were mined right after you posted on HN:

Block 478571 on Aug 2, 2017 16:20:19 AM UTC (4.7MB! since it holds ~12 hours worth of transactions)

Block 478572 on Aug 2, 2017 16:36:31 AM UTC

http://blockdozer.com/insight/blocks

Less than 12 hours.

My bad, thanks. I was looking at median time instead of timestamp.

how is the price established?

answered my own question:

https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin-cash/#markets

some exchanges support it.

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