Nail in the Coffin? BTC.top Shifts Hash to Bitcoin Cash ABC to ‘End Chaos’
Significant cryptocurrency mining outfit BTC.top has begun mining bitcoin cash on the blockchain supported by Bitcoin ABC (BCHABC), potentially putting another nail in the coffin of the minority Bitcoin SV (BSV) chain. Including its BTC operation, the pool has more hash by itself than all of BSV combined, meaning that the threat of a potential attack by Calvin Ayre’s CoinGeek is essentially neutralized as long as the BCH mining landscape remains otherwise consistent.
BTC.top CEO Jiang Zhuoer announced the move Saturday morning, stating that it was time to “end [the] chaos” caused by last week’s contentious hard fork.
Intervening blocks of BCHABC have been largely mined by BTC.com and Bitcoin.com. BTC.top regularly mines up to 6 percent of the regular Bitcoin network, and their contribution to BCHABC has resulted in a rate of about 5 percent of all blocks mined.
Zhuoer has written extensively in his native Chinese on the subject of the Bitcoin Cash debate. Some translations have been hard to decipher as they have had to be done from OCR images. All the same, he can be quoted as saying in an English-language blog post on the subject :
“Therefore without an effective arbitration mechanism to prevent unnecessary splitting of the BCH chain, it will impede adoption, which implies a reduction of users. This conflicts with the ideology of high-frequency use for a cash system. […] [H]ash voting is not a segmentation based on power, but rather it assumes the role of a jury which reflects the opinion of all participants in the system. The community has the right to signal their preference using all sorts of methods to affect voting. […] Hash vote is not the same as miner vote, but rather acts like a jury to reflect opinions of everyone in the community.”
In Proof-of-Work (PoW) systems, the longest chain wins, and currently, BCHABC is consistently ahead of BSV. Zhuoer has not indicated how long his pool will support ABC’s Bitcoin Cash chain, but at present, it seems the pool is mining both bitcoin cash and bitcoin proper. In fact, over the week it had mined 10 percent of the blocks in the regular Bitcoin network.
As for the BSV chain, four pools have primarily mined all of its blocks – CoinGeek, BMG Pool, and SV Pool. At time of writing, BSV was effectively seven blocks behind BCHABC, and its blocks were much larger in size.
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