Bitcoin Cash has Surpassed Bitcoin in global hashrate [Nov 13 2017] | Hacker News Reader

Bitcoin Cash has Surpassed Bitcoin in global hashrate [Nov 13 2017]

bitinfocharts.com

31 pointsbwasti33 comments

For those who are unaware, Bitcoin Cash is a fork of the bitcoin network (NOT an alt coin).

Over the years, there have been two conflicting visions for what Bitcoin should be.

The Core development team what Bitcoin to be digital gold settlement layer. A censorship resistent store of value for settling low volume, multi thousand dollar transactions, that costs hundreds of dollars per transaction. This is because the higher transaction fees are, the higher the "security" of the network is.

The other, competing vision for Bitcoin, and Bitcoin Cash, is that it should be a way for every day people to make every day transactions. They believe that fees per transaction should be measured in cents, at most. This vision sacrifices some amount of security, in order to allow mass adoption.

There are more complicated arguments, such as mythical "layer 2 and layer 3" solutions, called the lightning network, that could be deployed on the network, so as to help with scalability. But these solutions are perpetually 18 months away from completion.

Mostly recently, the settlement layer, high fees faction "won" by stopping one of attempted upgrades to the network, and the other side responded by forking the network and going its own way. That is Bitcoin Cash.

Bcash is just another altcoin.

The sole reason for the existence of Bitcoin Cash is pump and dump + (covert) ASICBOOST by Bitmain (largest chinese ASIC manufacturer) leading to greater centralization and an unfair advantage.

Please take some time to read: https://medium.com/@WhalePanda/asicboost-the-reason-why-bitm...

Besides that, Lightning Network can be deployed much quicker. In fact, it already runs on testnet e.g.: https://github.com/LN-Zap/zap-desktop / https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dhpg_8D2FPI

So how is bitcoin core going to scale ? Take a look at this: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/7cn5dj/so_how_is_b... (Schnorr, RSK, Segwit, Lightning and more)

Segwit has been active for 3 months, and average blocksize is around 1.05 MB.

So in 3 whole months, segwit has scaled the network by a measly 5%.

All the stuff you are talking about will likely end the same way.

It was short lived, much like the battle between ETC and ETH.

You can see the updated hash-rates here: https://fork.lol/pow/hashrate

This might equalize with BCH's fork today, which will give them a free difficulty adjustment.

There really wasn't a ETC ETH battle. BCH is currently trading about 1/5 of BTC and was briefly #2 in market cap.

what time is the fork happening?

That graph is many hours behind. https://fork.lol/pow/hashrate

The hashrate quickly jumped back to Bitcoin after the difficulty changed.

The difficulty rate fluctuates depending on how many people are mining it. Sometimes BCC is more profitable to mine and everyone piles into it. Then the difficulty goes up and all the miners go back to BTC. Doesn't really mean much.

Well, it means something since the BCH fork is capable of handling wild mining fluctuations, but the BTC chain is crippled by them. It can't keep happening.

Here's a good article on the recent situation:

https://fee.org/articles/a-beginner-s-guide-to-bitcoin-chaos...

I hope this will eventually happen with bitcoingold. Bitcoin and bitcoincash should have never been allowed to be mineable with ASIC's. For now it's still Bitmain's game.

This was achieved by paying miners substantially more. That payment gets pulled out of the Bitcoin Cash market cap when the miners sell their coins.

This news is essentially equivalent to saying "On November 13th, Salesforce outspent Apple in cyber security. This is one of just a few days in all of history where the security spending for that day for Salesforce exceeded the security spending of Apple for that day. Apple is expected to fall into a death spiral soon."

"During which time, apple was only able to spend 5% of their normal security expenses"

As someone out of the loop, why do the series have noted periods where the rates have inverse extrema, starting with Oct 1?

It's probably miners switching between the two depending on which is more profitable at the time.

I'd guess that it is large pools of miners switching over together.

the difficulty of BCH is about 35% that of BTC. so blocks are generated faster if given the same hashrate. That makes BCH profitable to mine even at a fraction of the market price.

This flip of "profitability" has miners chasing the most $/second. Mining pools even have automatic switches that change networks depending upon the current network state.

The original difficulty algorithm is very slow, and the BCH "EDA" difficulty algorithm is predictably chaotic in a way that guarantees these immediate extremes of profitability vs unprofitability. It is being patched with a stable 144 block average presently (the next block at time of writing), at which point the swings will not be as extreme.

The reason it started around Oct. is because the price of BTC had historically made BCH unprofitable at almost any difficulty, but a positive BCH price swing has changed that.

According to this site the average transaction fee for Bitcoin right now is $19.20! I'm not sure what is going to happen long term, but it's interesting to watch from the sidelines as this situation evolves.

that's because it's more profitable to mine BCH now before the difficulty adjustment kicks in. Didn't they recently hard fork to relax the difficulty adjustment rules so this exact situation could happen?

Alternatively Bitmain has just plugged in a new batch of their ASICBoost

Isn't the difficulty the same? Why wouldn't you want to mine whichever coin cost more?

No, it's not the same, since they are completely separate now and run the difficulty adjustment independently.

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