If more hashpower sticks with BCH, I would consider it to be the winner.
Given the extremely low liquidity of all the exchanges (large holders often move their funds off-line), the markets rates are trivially manipulated. This in turn manipulates miner incentives.
Social media is a shit show of shills and propaganda from all angles. So really only time will tell.
The r/bitcoin and r/btc sub-reddits really went to trash recently. Everyone's been bickering about their own opinions. Worst of all, constant front page vitriol about each other.
I don't know what this fixation is on hashrate. As long as it doesn't drop to low enough a level for someone who wants to attack it to be successful, it doesn't make any difference to the coin's functionality.
Anyone with the ability to buy or sell a large amount of crypt can manipulate the markets. This holds doubly true in the middle of the night on a weekend.
The interplay between hashrate, difficulty, txs, fees, price, and sentiment is pretty complicated and definitely important. See http://www.fork.lol to see this illustrated.
I'm curious about historic precedents - I really don't know much about the history of currency. There must have been analogues in the past - I know Isaac Newton famously went to war with counterfeiters, but that (and vague memories of hearing about bank currency in the US) about the only instance of currency competition I know of.
Anyone want to recommend a quality book on the topic?
Right now BCH has a way higher hash rate than the difficulty, but that is going to adjust in 8hr or sooner if the trend continues. At that point, BTC will again be more profitable and you would expect everyone to switch back. Meanwhile, the fees on BTC are going way up because that chain gets used more frequently. That will also pressure miner back to the BTC chain.
That happened when BCH was new. What happened then was that everyone switched to BTC, the BCH chain stopped completely for a few hours, and then BCH's extra difficulty adjustment rule kicked in and lowered the difficulty a lot, so everyone switched to BCH again. That oscillation was leading to periods of nearly zero blocks and periods of nearly a block per minute for the BCH chain. To prevent that, some BCH supporters left enough miners in the BCH chain that the extra difficulty adjustment rule didn't kick in, even when it was less profitable.
From what I've read, this time there's a difference: in a few days, BCH (or at least some of it) will have a hardfork which changes the extra difficulty adjustment rule. I haven't seen a good explanation of the new rule so far (only complaints that it was unilaterally decided by some developers), but depending on how it works this might be the last time miners can get thousands of blocks in a few days, which would explain why this time there's so much hash power in the BCH chain. And depending on how it works, there might be no longer a need for BCH supporters to keep enough miners in the BCH chain to prevent the extra difficulty adjustment rule from kicking in, so it's even possible that every miner switches to BTC at once.
On the other hand, if the new extra difficulty adjustment rule works, jumping from one chain to the other might become less profitable, so some miners might decide to stay on the BCH chain permanently. These miners might be now selling their BTC for BCH, which would neatly explain the rise in the BCH price and the drop in the BTC price.
It was blatantly obvious (to me) that something funny going on at MtGox meant the price was not real. The number of global exchanges, alt coins, and overall crytpocurrency appreciation in 2017 makes it almost impossible to sniff out potential problems. Despite the radical transparency of the blockchain ledger, all of the other trading and exchange activity is quite opaque.
I find the supposed "voting power" of the miners to be a mirage. When it comes down to it they just follow the money.
Basically, every 12 hours the difficulty resets and then they get 2 weeks worth of mining + inflation in just a few days (at lower prices, just a few hours).
That's not a good thing for you if you hold bch.
Neither hashpower nor price make it the winner. In the long term, actual people wanting to hold & use it makes a winner. Price and hashpower follow that.
Either you or I are having trouble parsing the English language tonight. I never implied otherwise.
If you read about the New York Agreement and you understand the technical implications of it then you should have a very clear idea about what is going to happen when the exchanges start honoring that agreement.
Which says:
> We agree to immediately support the following parallel upgrades to the bitcoin protocol, which will be deployed simultaneously and based on the original Segwit2Mb proposal:
- Activate Segregated Witness at an 80% threshold, signaling at bit 4
- Activate a 2 MB hard fork within six months
Where does Bitcoin Cash fit in here, and what's going to happen when the exchanges start honouring it? Was BCH the hard fork they talked about? What hasn't been honoured yet?
There is some argument about who all actually signed on to the NY agreement - whether they represented the community at large, or just a smaller non-binding group. The contentiousness was overtly regarding the "2mb" increase's long-term consequences, but IMO it may have also been because adopting it would have essentially kicked out the existing software development group, replacing with a smaller less experienced group.
If the hard fork had happened, the NY agreement asserted it would have simply upgraded the BTC protocol; rather than create a new coin. Agreeing exchanges would have had to go along with the protocol upgrade. But concensus never formed, particularly among exchanges & businesses that didn't sign the NYA.
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Bitcoin Cash / BCH was a separate coin that forked off of BTC around the same time as the NYA, but wasn't part of the NYA. It increased the block size (the "2mb" bit), but explicitly rejects segregated witness and some related changes. It's kinda odd it happened, because those involved in BCH were leaders in the NY agreement itself; so BCH be seen as an early repudiation of the NY agreement by it's own champions.
Also, comments like "if you understand the technical implications of it then you should have a very clear idea about what is going to happen" are really unhelpful, like a no-op soaked in condescension.