Relative hashpower of BTC and BCH in percentage of total
fork.lol
fork.lol
The absolute hashrate of the Bitcoin network is still increasing [0].
All this chart demonstrates is that the hashrate of Bitcoin Cash is increasing faster than the hashrate of Bitcoin.
This also means that NEW hashing power is coming online, not that hashing power is necessarily switching from Bitcoin to Bitcoin Cash (even if it's currently more profitable to mine Bitcoin Cash than Bitcoin [1]).
It seems that is the case if you consider only the block reward, but not if you also consider the transaction fees: http://fork.lol/reward/blocks
The BTC chain has more transactions per block than the BCH chain, and the per-transaction fee is also higher.
The graph you linked is not considering block difficulty.
Here's a link to a recent full block found on the Bitcoin chain, total transaction fees were 0.43 BTC (or about $1,750).
Recent Full Block on Bitcoin Chain - https://blockchain.info/block/00000000000000000112ebb0462fe5...
Clicking on the 'difficulty' tab seems to confirm this:
http://fork.lol/pow/difficulty
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I barely remember some mention of (at least the potential for) miners cooperating to reduce the difficulty for BCH after the fork. If I'm understanding this right (unlikely!), the relative hashpower is a pretty bad metric for comparison unless difficulty is also factored in?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14901033
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I personally use the open source NiceHash client to earn what currently works out to $.06/day with a single older desktop GPU (thanks "free" internet + electricity!) because I don't want to be bothered with micro-managing to point the infinitesimally small fraction of mining power I experiment with in the optimal direction.
[0] https://medium.com/@jimmysong/bitcoin-cash-difficulty-adjust...
This was linked elsewhere in this discussion: http://fork.lol/pow/retarget
which i think will inversely affect profitability?
The difficulty of mining BCH is currently expected to increase at the next difficulty adjustment, and thus profitability will go down.
As a result, it's very likely to see another hard fork to 2 MB in November, so there will be 3 chains with a shared transaction history, and most like all will claim to be the real Bitcoin -- personally I don't think debating which one is the "real" one is worthwhile, just use the one you want, but eventually it's likely that one chain will get the majority of hashing power and have a much higher price per token than all the others.
The "compromise" framing of "we gave you SegWit, now you have to give us a hard fork" is pretty terrible too, because the two aren't symmetrical - SegWit makes hard forking less urgent, but hard forking to increase the block size makes the SegWit improvements more important because they're designed to make larger blocks work better. Even Bitcoin Cash copied one of the key SegWit improvements, the transaction hashing change, in very slightly modified form for this reason.
More recently a large group of players in the space came together and agreed to what has come to be called the New York Agreement (NYA) This said that they would support Segwit and a 2MB hard fork for bigger blocks. Core and Blockstream who largely controls Core have ignored the NYA and worked against it. They are pretending like segwit has support w/o the 2MB block increase when it doesn't and they are going around doing some truly cringe worthy stuff to tray and scuttle the 2MB part of it.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/6uw5kf/why_does_core_r...
No, a couple of developers did. I think every core developer not in the room went "wtf, no".
https://blockstream.com/2017/07/31/segwit-myths-debunked.htm...
All humans are driven by self-interest, as far as I understand Blockstream employees are humans.
Edit: After re-reading my response, I wasn't trying to be a jerk to you, poking fun at Blockstream.
i think:
bch was created by people who want to use adjustable block size caps to scale transaction volume, and this favours established miners and consolidates their influence.
segwit was created by people who want to try a second layer for transactions (specifically the lightning network), and some miners are opposed to this direction because they would not collect fees on layer-2 transactions.