Bitcoin Cash Hash War Stacking Heavy Loses

| Updated
by Teuta Franjkovic · 7 min read
Bitcoin Cash Hash War Stacking Heavy Loses
Photo: Pixabay

Miners on both sides of the Bitcoin Cash divide are currently running at significant losses after the hard fork of November 15, crypto experts from BitMex exchange have claimed.

Bitcoin Cash, the fourth-largest cryptocurrency began attracting mainstream attention this week when two competing software-development teams failed to agree on how to best update the code and ended up splitting the network. The fight was blamed for contributing to the biggest drop in eight months for Bitcoin, which Bitcoin Cash had split off from last year.

While BCHABC almost immediately became the longer chain, BCHSV saw support from exchanges, seemingly prepared to take over the entire network.

According to BitMEX Research, BCH miners might have lost more than $6.1 million in gross revenue since last week’s blockchain split. However, they agree that Bitcoin SV will not “keep this up forever.”

The monitoring tool which also monitors the Bitcoin [BTC] blockchain, showed that miners of the Bitcoin Cash SV are burning an estimated $280,000 daily mining on the chain.

Bitcoin ABC miners were making bigger losses according to the tweet posted by the BitMex research team. Data from the monitoring tool estimated that the ABC miners were incurring as much as $948,621 daily on electricity charges which brought the mining cost per coin to $527. Valued at $283 per token, the ABC miners earned an estimated $509,400 which left them running a deficit of $439,221daily.

Put in perspective, Bitcoin [BTC] miners are making pure $4,084,432 in total profit daily. This stems from a mining cost per coin of $3,341 and coin value of $5,500.

The Losses will Cascade as the Prices will Keep Falling

However, it’s worth to notice that either profits or loss gained from such mining would at present be on paper only, as neither BCH nor BSV has exactly the most liquid market at this time. If the holders attempt to realize them in Bitcoin or Fiat, the losses will probably jump up and down because the market support of the prices used in the estimation would quickly vanish, replaced by lower rates, as the forces of supply and demand dictate.

It’s also good to know that not everyone renting cash is finding blocks. As we could already see, many of Bitcoin Cash miners owning their hardware, chose to mine on BCH chains for various reasons.

According to data from CoinDance, Bitcoin ABC still leads Bitcoin SV but by a much-diminished margin after 292 blocks mined after the consensus change. Bitcoin ABC leads by 18 blocks and is also 59.3 % ahead on Proof of Work.

The Bitcoin Cash SV maintains the support of Coingeek owner Calvin Ayre; its blocks are mined by the Coingeek pool, SV pool, and BMG pool while Bitcoin Cash ABC is supported by Bitmain CEO Jihan Wu and has so far been mined by BTC.com pool, Bitcoin.com pool, AntPool, ViaBTC, and Waterhole.

While initially unwilling to participate in the hash war, Bitcoin ABC supporter and co-founder of Bitmain, Jihan Wu, eventually entered anyway.

He stated that the war will relocate the hash power from mining Bitcoin to mining Bitcoin Cash, which is why Bitcoin price will drop significantly. This was already witnessed during the previous week, with Bitcoin losing over $1,000 in value, and dropping to $5,300.

Craig Wright: nChain is Here to Stay

As for nChain’s leading researcher that started the “BSV rebellion”, Craig Wright, he seems to believe that in the end, after months or even years, miners may take over and Bitcoin Cash may end up with just one blockchain.

He said:

“Going forward we will start to open up and allow business use of the Bitcoin blockchain. Bitcoin scales, and we will be demonstrating this in the coming days as we first start running 128-MB blocks and we will move to remove the block cap altogether. In the coming years, we plan to support an unbounded blocksize and as many transactions as people are willing to send us.”

He also said that in a couple of weeks at the CoinGeek conference (that will be held from 28th to 30th November in London), they will give some information of what they have been working on at nChain.

“It is not a method to create anonymous systems to help promote and create anarchy. Rather, we have been developing technologies to increase business efficiency, to open markets, and to allow trade. The error in how many have come to see Bitcoin stems from the HODL fallacy and the concept of getting rich off the work of others. That is to buy and wait as others work to create value and no more. We will start to demonstrate how this does not matter and, in time, how we will stabilise the volatility of the system making a path for use as cash and far more.”

https://twitter.com/ProfFaustus/status/1064615199737556992

Still, some markets prefer to wait and see if either chain manages to become dominant. In case BCHSV succeeds and displaces the other version, those who sided with the ABC version may lose funds.

It is also uncertain what would become of the BCHSV funds that Bitmain now owns. There is a question on whether BCHSV can be sold without affecting the BCHABC balance, but if the coins are safely split and separated, Bitmain may tank the market price of BCHSV.

Related Updates on CoinMarketCap

CoinMarketCap has merged the market cap of Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin Cash ABC to avoid confusion as many exchanges are still using Bitcoin Cash to refer to Bitcoin Cash ABC implementation. The market cap of Bitcoin Cash/Bitcoin Cash ABC nosedived to the ground from $6.72 billion to $4.13 billion.

Binance released a notice that it had delisted the original bitcoin cash (with ticker symbol BCC) and have replaced it with Bitcoin Cash ABC and Bitcoin Cash SV on a 1:1 basis for its loyal customers. It assigned ticker symbols BCHSV and BCHABC respectively to the new tokens and its CEO Changpeng Zhao says there’s no going back on that decision.

Huobi crypto exchange has announced that it would designate the Bitcoin Cash [BCH] symbol to the Bitcoin ABC chain as a result of the November 15 hard fork of the Bitcoin Cash blockchain.

The tweet by the crypto exchange reads:

“ABC Version Of Bitcoin Cash (BCH) To Be Re-Designated BCH: Huobi Global has confirmed that the ABC version of Bitcoin Cash (BCH) will be retained for the designation of BCH.”

In a statement published on its website, Huobi explained that the Bitcoin Cash ABC, was assigned the original Bitcoin Cash ticker symbol (BCH) because it was the longer chain at the time.

OKEx, the second largest crypto exchange by trading volume, informed its users that it would temporarily assign BCHSV and BCHABC ticker symbols for the Bitcoin Cash SV and Bitcoin Cash ABC chains respectively until it decides which would inherit the BCH ticker.

As a result of the steep price drop in bitcoin, the altcoin market is mainly in dark red territory. ETH is down by 17 percent, EOS is down 15 percent, and LTC is down 18 percent. Only XRP bucks the trend and closes the week slightly in the green as Ripple continues to increase adoption among banks.

Bitcoin Price Manipulation Becomes Conspiracy Theory

Numerous Reddit posts claim that the Bitcoin Cash situation was artificially caused so that Bitcoin would suffer major damage. The alleged reasons behind this are the fact that Bakkt is about to arrive, and a possibility of Bitcoin ETFs being approved soon. Even if only one of these events comes to pass, the Bitcoin ecosystem will see a massive increase in money.

The market is still in pretty much of a chaos, and many investors are wondering whether all of it was done only so that Bitcoin’s price can be easily manipulated. Speculations like this emerged from all corners of the internet, and the community is holding its breath while awaiting the end of the battle.

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