At approximately 4 pm EDT at block height 504031, the Bitcoin Cash (BCH) network successfully hard forked. The fork is a change to the decentralized currency’s consensus rules and aims to upgrade the network’s Difficulty Adjustment Algorithm (DAA).
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The Bitcoin Cash Network Has Successfully Hard Forked
November 13 is a memorable day for bitcoin cash supporters, as the network is forking in order to fix the BCH blockchain’s DAA. The primary development teams who have been working on the bitcoin cash protocol consensus change include Bitcoin ABC, Unlimited, Nchain, and XT developers. The original DAA applied to the BCH network allowed the currency to thrive but also produced wild hashrate fluctuations. After several DAA proposals were researched and tested by the above-mentioned development teams, the community chose to implement a DAA proposal from Bitcoin ABC’s lead developer Amaury Sechet.
The new BCH consensus change hopes to adjust the difficulty to hashrate to target a mean block interval of 600 seconds. Alongside this, the DAA aims to make sudden difficulty drops and spikes avoidable. For instance, the network will adjust difficulty rapidly when the hashrate changes exponentially, while also avoiding feedback oscillations. Sechet’s DAA is based on a 144-period simple moving average according to the ABC team.
“The difficulty is adjusted each block, based on the amount of work done and the elapsed time of the previous 144 blocks,” explains the Bitcoin ABC development team.
The Bitcoin Cash DAA Should Keep Block Times Consistent and the Mining Ecosystem Honest
Essentially the consensus change means the new DAA should keep block times stable and consistent at roughly 10 minutes per block. So far this goal of 10-minute block intervals has come to fruition. Now that the fork has happened BCH network participants will wait and see what happens with miners who have been hopping back and forth between two chains. Many BCH supporters believe this will level the playing field and from here on out, as the BTC and BCH competition should be fair without any miners gaming the system.
Miners will now have to choose the best solution and be more confident in the chain they are targeting. Both cryptocurrencies market values will be weighed heavily as the price will have more of an impact on the mining profitability for both networks. At the moment, one bitcoin cash is trading at just above $1300 per BCH, and BCH mining profitability has been on parity with BTC for the last hour. Presently it is 2 percent more profitable to mine on the bitcoin cash chain.
Overall bitcoin cash supporters seem very pleased with the successful DAA upgrade, but it will take some time to see its full progression. For now, many BCH supporters continue to believe in the cryptocurrency’s ultimate goal of becoming a peer-to-peer electronic cash system. This week a great number of early BTC adopters vouched for the BCH protocol as a store of value and means of exchange.
News.Bitcoin.com will be following the network change closely and will keep our readers informed of any upcoming developments concerning this hard fork.
What do you think about the bitcoin cash network’s hard fork? Let us know in the comments below.
Images via Bitcoincash.org, Coin Dance, and the Bitcointalk user Mjbmonetarymetals
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