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BitPay Sides with Bitcoin ABC in Bitcoin Cash Hard Fork

Last Updated March 4, 2021 3:10 PM
P. H. Madore
Last Updated March 4, 2021 3:10 PM

BitPay has joined the litany of industry heavyweights including Coinbase and Binance in backing the Bitcoin Cash ABC side of the upcoming Bitcoin Cash hard fork.

Without delving too much into the debate surrounding the upcoming chain split, Bitpay said in a blog post :

BitPay’s system uses the primary software implementation of Bitcoin Cash called Bitcoin ABC. Bitcoin ABC has scheduled a Bitcoin Cash protocol change via hard fork on November 15th. […] BitPay has not made any plans to migrate from the Bitcoin ABC implementation of Bitcoin Cash to a different implementation.

They also recommended that users not send transactions in the time surrounding the actual hard fork, saying this could increase the risk to user funds being lost or double-spent.

During the fork, your funds held in your wallet will be safe, and you won’t be at risk of losing funds. However, we strongly recommend that you stop sending or receiving transactions from your Bitcoin Cash wallets at 10 AM EST (about two hours before the fork). During a hard fork , there is an increased risk that outgoing or incoming transactions can be lost or double-spent.

With Coinbase, Bitpay, and Binance all having announced support for one side of the split, the “Satoshi Vision” client and chain, which as a baseline raises the maximum block size to 128MB currently only truly has the support of the largest BCH mining pool, Coingecko. If the economic support of the market tends toward one version or the other, miners are likely to follow suit – individual miners, without regard to the mining pool as a whole.

Craig Wright and nChain believe they are restoring the original vision of Bitcoin and disregard all evidence to the contrary. CEO Jimmy Nguyen said earlier this year:

Answering the call of miners, nChain is happy to provide technical capabilities needed to support Bitcoin SV. Once the Bitcoin protocol is fully restored and maintained, global businesses and developers can reliably build robust applications, projects and ventures upon it – just as they reliably build upon the long-stable Internet protocols. The future of Bitcoin is big blocks, big business, and big growth. Bitcoin SV is an important step toward that big future by advancing the professionalization of Bitcoin.

Featured image from Shutterstock.