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First Cash, Now Gold? Another Bitcoin Hard Fork Is on the Way

first cash now gold

First Cash, Now Gold? Another Bitcoin Hard Fork Is on the Way

Bitcoin, bitcoin cash, bitcoin gold?

There could be as many as four cryptocurrencies bearing the bitcoin name if a small group of miners and developers carry out a planned fork of the blockchain this month.

Styled as a rebellion of sorts, bitcoin gold aims to follow a similar launch plan as bitcoin cash — the blockchain that split from bitcoin this summer by way of a "hard fork." The idea of the project is to release an improved protocol, one that will challenge bitcoin cash in particular, and details are now starting to come come into focus.

Led by Jack Liao, CEO of Hong Kong mining firm LightningASIC, bitcoin gold is slated to launch on October 25, with its cryptocurrency being opened to exchanges on November 1.

Still, while whispers of the event are just beginning to spread, the importance of the project appears up for debate. Given that bitcoin cash produced an ultimately smaller bitcoin network, not to mention a cryptocurrency that's worth about 12 percent as much as bitcoin at press time, most seem to view the plan as another distraction in an already divided community.

For one, bitcoin gold looks like it could be even smaller that bitcoin cash, at least in that not as many miners seem to support it.

In remarks, BTC.Top founder Jiang Zhuoer and ViaBTC CEO Haipo Yang — two early champions of bitcoin cash — went so far as to downplay bitcoin gold as insignificant.
 

'Decentralized again'

But while those in the know might be skeptical of bitcoin gold, it does have a goal that many in the community may find attractive: creating a truly decentralized bitcoin.

Most notably, the developers behind the network hope to open up mining to more participants by replacing bitcoin's mining algorithm with one that will enable it to be mined with graphics cards. The idea is to make big miners — sometimes controversial figures on the network — less relevant.

"Bitcoin gold will implement a proof-of-work change from bitcoin's SHA256 to Equihash, a memory-hard algorithm that is ASIC-resistant and optimized for GPU mining," explained pseudonymous bitcoin gold developer "The Sorrow."

That the plan is being hatched in China, long the hotbed of bitcoin mining, only adds another layer to the story. Liao, whose mining hardware largely focuses on the litecoin network, is seen as one of the few voices domestically that can challenge the established order.

Yet, Liao was quick to name one mining firm in particular, Bitmain, as the reason that more bitcoin users should support the idea. A mining company that has been at the center of bitcoin drama over the last year, critics have long argued that the firm has too much of an influence over the network.

Still, creating a network that grows so popular as to remove miners is easier said than done, and some are skeptical that this would lead to the end goal that bitcoin gold advocates desire.

"GPU mining can't prevent centralization. GPU [markets] are controlled by Nvidia and AMD," Zhao Dong, a cryptocurrency trader and investor, argued in response to the plan.

Liao, however, argued the accessibility of the companies' products means the distribution of hashing power might evolve differently.

 

Bitcoin gold's unknowns

Again, though, even project leaders admit many of the details around the hard fork are fuzzy.

Bitcoin gold's pseudonymous lead developer "h4x" said that the project is "still evolving" and details such as exact block height of the hard fork are still up for discussion.

According to the original website text, bitcoin gold was even planning an initial coin offering (ICO) by which 1 percent of the bitcoin gold coins would go to the developer team, but these details have since been removed.

One thing is clear though about the funding: because of the nature of the split, every bitcoin user at the time will have an equal amount of bitcoin gold associated with their private key.

"It is a minimalist fork of the Bitcoin Core codebase in the spirit of litecoin — only a few conservative modifications," said h4x.

H4x went on to describe bitcoin gold in more abstract biological terms, arguing that it tests how well hard forks work and if they benefit the ecosystem.

He said:

"Organisms derive benefits from creating offspring. With bitcoin gold we are conducting an experiment to see if that principle holds true in the world of blockchains."

And this sentiment is largely in line with developers who have predicted that more bitcoin forks similar to bitcoin cash will come forth in the future.

After bitcoin cash forked earlier this summer, for example, Lightning Network developer Tadge Dryja argued that more forks would spring up, but for another reason: money.

With bitcoin gold in the works and another hard fork slated for November, it seems that prediction is slowly becoming reality.

 

Sep 27, 2017 at 08:00 UTC by Alyssa Hertig

 

Posted by David Ogden Entrepreneur
David Ogden Cryptocurrency entrepreneur

Alan Zibluk Markethive Founding Member

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Bitcoin Cash — The New King of Cryptocurrency

Bitcoin Cash - The New King of Cryptocurrency

Bitcoin Cash — The New King of Cryptocurrency

Less than a month ago, a few new lines of code and a verbal agreement forked the Bitcoin blockchain, creating a newer, more nimble version called Bitcoin Cash. Since its arrival on Aug. 1, the infant cryptocurrency has more than doubled in value from $300 to a price north of $600, and investors are now wondering if its popularity poses a serious threat to the Bitcoin throne.

Bitcoin Cash is essentially a clone of the existing Bitcoin blockchain​ with one important feature: additional block size capacity (more on that later). Those who owned Bitcoin before the split now own an equal amount of Bitcoin Cash, meaning Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin each now have 16.5 million units in circulation. Multiply Bitcoin Cash’s recent price of $607 times 16.5 million units, and you arrive at a market cap of $10.8 billion, making it the third-most valuable cryptocurrency​ at around 16% of Bitcoin’s $69 billion market value. An asset with the same value as streaming-music service Spotify or social media giant Twitter was born overnight.

Bitcoin Cash - The New King of Cryptocurrency

Source: Coinmarketcap.com

Bitcoin Cash got off to a slow start but sprang to life as the cryptocurrency’s mining algorithm self-corrected to attract profit-seeking computers, known as miners. These super-computers are the beating heart of the blockchain responsible for verifying and embedding transactions in digital ledgers, called blocks. Once the market noticed a rise in the rate at which blocks were being produced, known as the hash rate, investors bid up the price of the resulting tokens.

Bitcoin Cash - The New King of Cryptocurrency

Source: Tradingview.com

An Answer to a Years-Long Dispute

When Bitcoin was first introduced in 2009, block sizes were unlimited. To buy and sell Bitcoin, wallets required users to keep a record of the entire blockchain. It was as if one had to download the entire history of Google searches to find something on the internet. This led to an abundance of Denial of Service (DOS) attacks as hackers stuffed blocks with meaningless transactions making it difficult for users with slower computers to transact. To alleviate this problem, the Bitcoin community moved to limit block size to one megabyte (MB)

Currently, the 1 MB block size limits transaction speeds to four to seven per second, which can’t compete with Visa's and Paypal’s 2,000 transactions per second. Newer, innovative wallets permit an increase in block sizes, and the introduction of Bitcoin Cash is necessary to scale for mass adoption as a payment platform.

The new cryptocurrency attempts to solve the scaling problem by increasing existing block sizes from 1 MB to 8 MB, thereby increasing the amount of transactions processed per day and improving transaction speed.

Critics argue that larger block sizes will lead to the centralization of mining operations, as larger blocks require professional hardware. This would run counter to the idea of a decentralized network of miners, and limit oversight of the Bitcoin network to a few large miners and nodes.

What Has Happened Recently

To run a cryptocurrency, miners must confirm and account for recent transactions and mine new blocks. Their profitability is the spread between the value of the block reward (price of the coin x # issued per block) and the amount of resources needed to mine the block (known as the “difficulty”). The hash rate is the speed at which blocks are created. Higher hash rates make mining coins more lucrative as it increases the opportunity of mining the next block and receiving the reward.

The blockchain contains an important, self-correcting mechanism that can either speed up or slow down the hash rate when necessary. Essentially, the mathematical formula at the heart of the blockchain goes through a difficulty adjustment every 2,016 blocks. The difficulty is set so that 2,016 blocks will be mined just about every two weeks. If the pace is too slow, the difficulty adjusts downwards; and if the pace is too quick, the algorithm becomes more difficult to solve.

As Bitcoin Cash struggled out of the gates to attract miners, its difficulty adjusted sharply downward, making mining an extremely lucrative proposition. Accordingly, Bitcoin miners chased the easy money and shifted capacity to Bitcoin Cash. Hash rates subsequently skyrocketed, and this caused havoc to the original Bitcoin network. In just the past few days, the Bitcoin hash rate has been halved—slowing down the network and raising transaction prices.

Bitcoin Cash - The New King of Cryptocurrency

Source: Blockchain.info

Reports on social media say that Bitcoin transactions are taking hours or even days to confirm. However, the slower hash rate means that Bitcoin’s difficulty adjustment will be lowered for the next cycle and lead to an increase in miners.
 

The Bottom Line

Blockchain miners are now shifting capacity to Bitcoin Cash’s larger block-sized network, which is temporarily troublesome for the Bitcoin network. However, the difficulty adjustment for both networks will ensure that Bitcoin remains the king cryptocurrency—at least for now.

 

Author: Ian King August 28, 2017

 

Posted by David Ogden Entrepereneur

Alan Zibluk Markethive Founding Member

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In Less Than 2 Days, Bitcoin Cash Becomes Third Biggest Cryptocurrency

In Less Than 2 Days, Bitcoin Cash Becomes Third Biggest Cryptocurrency

In Less Than 2 Days, Bitcoin Cash Becomes Third Biggest Cryptocurrency
 

Barely 48 hours since its spin-off from the Bitcoin blockchain, Bitcoin Cash has already surged past other cryptocurrencies to become the third-biggest in terms of market capitalization. How the currency will fare over time is still up for debate, as it still lacks support from several mining pools and major exchanges.
 

UNEXPECTED BOOM

Less than two days after splitting from the main Bitcoin network, Bitcoin Cash [BCC] now ranks third amongst the world’s most valuable cryptocoins. The budding cryptocurrency has reached a market cap of more $7.7 billion as of this writing, overtaking Ripple’s $6.7 billion market cap.

 

With a market cap of a little more than $44 billion, the original Bitcoin currency is leading the market, while Ethereum comes in second at $20.9 billion. In terms of value per coin, Bitcoin Cash is even ahead of Ethereum’s current valuation of $223.54, with a per unit value of $470.27.
 

The surge in Bitcoin Cash comes despite a lack of support from several mining pools and major exchanges like Coinbase and BitMEX. Some Coinbase users are even threatening to sue the exchange for not recognizing the currency.

 

Blockchain Global’s recently re-opened Australian Cryptocurrency Exchange, on the other hand, is confirming Bitcoin Cash trades and claims to have seen a huge demand for the currency. “We are receiving a lot of off-market orders for bitcoin cash — they’re exploding!” venture partner Sebastian Quinn-Watson told Business Insider.
 

A VOLATILE CURRENCY
 

The creation of Bitcoin Cash was the result of an ongoing debate regarding how to scale Bitcoin blockchain transactions, and experts are currently divided on how the split will ultimately play out.

 

For now, this sudden increase in value is understandable. Bitcoin Cash carries all the history of the original Bitcoin platform up until the fork on August 1, which means anyone with Bitcoin now has an equal amount of Bitcoin Cash.

 

Eventually, Bitcoin Cash should be able to stabilize itself for market exchanges, but right now, speculation is causing a surge in initial interest. “People are selling their Bitcoin positions and buying Bitcoin Cash as a proposition that it is the ‘new coin’ that has more value in the future,” explained Quinn-Watson. “It’s a bit speculative.”

 

No one knows for sure how long Bitcoin Cash can sustain this upshot. As with other digital currencies, Bitcoin Cash’s value depends mainly on how much value investors assign to it and how easily it can be used for “real-world” transactions.

 

“There’s no infrastructure available out of the box to support BCC,” Fran Strajnar, co-founder and CEO of Brave New Coin, told CNBC. “The network needs further support and infrastructure needs to be as easy as Bitcoin; otherwise, it’s over for BCC.”

 

David Ogden
Entrepreneur

 

Author Dom Galeon

Alan Zibluk Markethive Founding Member

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Bitcoin Slide Looks Limited Even After Cryptocurrency Splits

Bitcoin Slide Looks Limited Even After Cryptocurrency Splits

Bitcoin Slide Looks Limited Even After Cryptocurrency Splits

Bitcoin might be dividing into two separate blockchains, but its downward slide has so far been contained, signaling confidence the biggest cryptocurrency will come out of the split unscathed.

The debate over how to scale bitcoin came to a head Tuesday as some cryptocurrency miners started using software called Bitcoin Cash and splitting a new blockchain off the old one. Blockchain is the technology used for verifying and recording digital currency transactions.

Bitcoin’s price should reflect the split by discounting the new coin, according to Charles Hayter, who runs the cryptocurrency data platform CryptoCompare. He likened it to a stock trading “ex dividend” — when the buyer isn’t entitled to collect a dividend on the shares.
 

After four days of gains, bitcoin was down $157, or 5.4 percent, to $2,729 at 11:05 a.m. in New York. Earlier in the day, the cryptocurrency fell as much as 8.4 percent, its biggest decline since July 25. Bitcoin cash futures rose 19 percent to $331, according to CoinMarketCap.com.

“The price of bitcoin has risen ahead of the split on the expectation that you’ll get that extra cash from bitcoin cash, so it should drop after the split,” Hayter said. “This has happened before in other blockchains. It’s a trading event where there’s number of hoops you have to jump though and people are trying to make a profit.”
 

Bitcoin Cash started gaining traction in the past week, just as miners fended off another split by rallying behind the scaling mechanism known as SegWit2X. Bitcoin Cash wants to increase the block size — the files in which transactions are recorded — while SegWit2X would transfer some of the operating power outside of the main blockchain. In other words, Bitcoin Cash would be one lane with bigger cars, while SegWit2X would be two lanes with smaller cars.

 

The great majority of miners and developers support bitcoin, while ViaBTC, which has almost 6 percent of bitcoin processing power, is the mining pool backing bitcoin cash.

“There’s a role for both of these coins,” said Cathie Wood, the New York-based chief investment officer at ARK Investment Management, which oversees the first exchange-traded fund with indirect exposure to bitcoin. “One is much more natural for store of value and the other one for a means of exchange.”

 

Some are less bullish. Ryan Taylor, chief executive officer of Dash Core, the sixth-biggest cryptocurrency, sees little chance that bitcoin cash will succeed in the long term.

 

“First, Bitcoin Cash has not solved scaling. It has merely kicked the can down the road with slightly larger blocks, but still lacks a credible technology to scale to massively larger numbers of users,” he said in an email. “Second, bitcoin will retain the network of integrated services that make the bitcoin network useful to businesses and consumers.”

 

Bitcoin holders are set to receive the same amount of bitcoin cash as they have in bitcoin if the exchanges and wallets they use support the new coin. Exchanges including Kraken and ViaBTC have said they’ll support both, while others like Coinbase and Poloniex have said they won’t, citing uncertainty that bitcoin cash will have lasting market value.

 

Kraken said that it’s working on crediting accounts with bitcoin cash, and that its site’s login function is down due to heavy traffic. While some miners are already using the Bitcoin Cash program, the real differentiation of the two blockchains will emerge when they mine more than 1 megabyte in one block, Hayter said. Bitcoin’s block limit is 1MB while Bitcoin Cash’s is 8MB.

“I’m not as concerned about this except for the administrative nightmare that some people are going to have to go through or have gone through already pulling out of the various exchanges that weren’t going to support it,” ARK Investment’s Wood said.

 

Bruce Fenton, founder of Atlantic Financial Inc. and a board member at the Bitcoin Foundation, said both currencies should trade heavily Tuesday.

“There are some very large holders who own bitcoin, who don’t like bitcoin and do like bitcoin cash,” he said. “But you also have a lot of people who can’t stand bitcoin cash, and as soon as they have the ability to get those coins they’re going to sell them on the market.”

“It could be a crazy day,” he said.

 

David Ogden
Entrepreneur

David Ogden Cryptocurrency Entreprenuer

 

Authors: Camilo Russ & Lily Katz

Alan Zibluk Markethive Founding Member

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Bitcoin Cash Futures Plunge on ViaBTC

Bitcoin Cash Futures Plunge on ViaBTC

 

The creators of Bitcoin Cash believe support for segregated witness was a mistake — and a diversion from Satoshi Nakamoto’s vision for Bitcoin — and they aim to help bitcoin scale by immediately increasing the block size from 1 MB to 8 MB.

Since Bitcoin Cash is forking the Bitcoin blockchain, most bitcoin holders will receive an equal number of bitcoin cash. As long as you control the private keys of your bitcoin wallet — or have your coins on an exchange which has pledged support for bitcoin cash — you will be able to claim your bitcoin cash. If your coins are on an exchange which opposes bitcoin cash — such as Coinbase — there is a good chance you will not receive them.

Although the UAHF has not yet been deployed, ViaBTC enabled traders to trade bitcoin cash futures (under symbol: BCC) by temporarily freezing their BTC balances on the platform.

Despite this move, ViaBTC says they are neutral and only added BCC support because they believed there would be a market for it. And indeed there was; 24-hour bitcoin cash volume surpassed $2 million on July 27, although it has since tapered to about $850 million. HitBTC later added BCC futures as well, although volume is extremely low.

 

Bitcoin Cash Price Chart from ViaBTC

Since its listing, the bitcoin cash price has plunged on ViaBTC. From July 24-25, the value of bitcoin cash futures hovered around $500. By the 26th, it had fallen to $400. Since then, it has continued to skid, falling below $300 on July 31. In the past day alone, the bitcoin cash price has declined 24% against bitcoin, bringing its present value to about $278 according to CoinMarketCap.

It’s important to remember that these are just futures. The actual bitcoin cash coins do not exist yet, so we shouldn’t extrapolate too much from the week that bitcoin cash futures were trading on ViaBTC. Right now, we have more questions than answers about the actual hard fork:

Will investors rush to sell their airdropped bitcoin cash for a quick payday, or will they take a more cautious route in case bitcoin cash gains traction?

Where will bitcoin cash debut in the market cap rankings? If the current price of its futures is any indication, it could vault to 4th place with a market cap of around $4.5 billion.

How will bitcoin cash affect the bitcoin price — and how much has it already? It is likely that bitcoin cash will pull at least some of its value from the bitcoin market cap, but how drastic and immediate will the transfer be? If the bitcoin cash price opens at $300, for instance, will the bitcoin price decline in response?

These are exciting — and anxious — times for bitcoin. Bitcoin cash already has a fairly solid wallet and exchange support, but the real test will be whether the miners get behind it. In any case, it will be extremely intriguing to watch the trajectory of the bitcoin cash over the coming weeks.

 

David Ogden
Entreprenuer

David Ogden Cryptocurrency Entrepreneur

 

 

Author: Josiah Wilmoth

 

Alan Zibluk Markethive Founding Member

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Bitcoin Cash — Another Fork in the Road for Bitcoin

Bitcoin Cash - Another Fork in the Road for Bitcoin

Bitcoin Cash — Another Fork in the Road for Bitcoin

Last week the bitcoin community and investors breathed a sigh of relief as BIP 91 locked in and activated, signalling what we thought was a great step forward in finally resolving the long standing Bitcoin scaling debate. Confidence soared and the price recovered from a previous tumble.

And then came a twist.

In the last 72 hours, Bitcoin increasingly looks as though it is heading for a user activated hard fork (UAHF) called Bitcoin Cash. It is scheduled for the notorious date of 1 August 2017, previously earmarked as the proposed date for implementation of SegWit by way of a user activated soft fork (UASF).
 

What is Bitcoin Cash?

Bitcoin Cash is an alternative token that may come into existence as a result of a planned UAHF as mentioned above. Essentially this means that the Bitcoin blockchain may split into two competing chains.
 

The original plan for a UAHF came about from a contingency plan, proposed by Bitcoin mining company, Bitmain, who were opposed to the UASF for SegWit.

At the Future of Bitcoin Conference held in Arnhem, Netherlands from 29 June to 1 July this year, a software engineer named Amaury Sechet announced an alternative Bitcoin client (software) called Bitcoin Adjustable Blocksize Cap (Bitcoin ABC).
 

It has now been revealed that the token for this client is Bitcoin Cash.

Bitcoin Cash will differ from Bitcoin in terms of the following:

SegWit: Bitcoin Cash will not implement SegWit

Blocksize: Immediate increase from 1MB to 8MB

Coexistence: Replay and wipe out protections ensures that should the two chains continue to compete, Bitcoin Cash aims to reduce user disruption and allows for the safe existence of two chains.

How Does This Impact Your BTC Holdings?

 

In short, it does not affect your BTC balance. Instead a chain split will result in you holding an equal number of coins on both the old and new chains, however, the value of those coins will be different and probably vary dramatically as they establish themselves as either the majority or minority chain.

 

The Community Reaction

Miners

Statements released thus far by a number of mining pools, including Bitmain, have said they will continue to support SegWit2x and the original Bitcoin chain, and do not rule out supporting the Bitcoin Cash chain as well. ViaBTC, an exchange as well as a Bitcoin mining pool (ViaPool) have listed Bitcoin Cash futures and have explicitly stated their mining support for the chain.

Exchanges

Exchanges seem to be more divided than the mining pools. Some major exchanges such as Coinbase, Coinfloor and Bitstamp are not signalling any strong support for Bitcoin Cash and have left the crediting of the forked coins to their discretion. On the other hand, Bitfinex and Kraken, two other major Bitcoin exchanges, have announced that they will be crediting the forked coins to client accounts and will list the coin for trading. This could be vital to the coins survival as without any trusted exchanges listing the coin, there would be no market for it.

 

As we quickly approach 1 August 2017, a day that will long be spoken about in the Bitcoin community, the Bitcoin price will likely be volatile and an influx of opinions will generate a degree of hysteria amongst unseasoned Bitcoin investors.

 

David Ogden
Entrepreneur

David Ogden Cryptocurrency Entrepreneur
 

Author: Adam Norrie

Alan Zibluk Markethive Founding Member