It has become likely that Bitcoin Cash will be created by a group of miners led by ViaBTC on August 1. However, investors should not fear the creation of Bitcoin Cash.
Last week, some of the largest and leading Bitcoin exchanges and businesses including Coinbase and BitMEX clarified that they are not in favor of Bitcoin Cash and thus, cannot support the hard fork led by ViaBTC.
Coinbase emphasized that it is not willing to support Bitcoin Cash due to its contentious nature, while BitMEX noted that Bitcoin Cash will likely lead to serious security issues.
“BitMEX will not support the split or distribution of Bitcoin Cash, nor will BitMEX be liable for any Bitcoin Cash sent to BitMEX. Therefore, it is up to our users to withdraw from BitMEX prior to August 1st if they wish to access Bitcoin Cash tokens or any other hardfork,” said BitMEX.
Bitmain, arguably the most influential mining equipment manufacturer in the industry and the operator of the largest Bitcoin mining pool Antpool, initially introduced the possibility of hard forking the Bitcoin Blockchain in order to create Bitcoin Cash.
But, in its later announcement, Bitmain emphasized that the user-activated hard fork (UAHF) was merely a contingency plan for user-activated soft fork (UASF). Further adding that it did not intend to pursue the execution of a hard fork if the mining community, industry, and users came together and agreed on one activation mechanism to activate the Bitcoin Core development team’s transaction malleability fix and scaling solution Segregated Witness (SegWit).
In the end, the mining community locked in Bitcoin Improvement Proposal BIP 91, which led to the lock-in of BIP 141 and finalization of SegWit activation.
Bitcoin investors should not fear Bitcoin Cash hard fork
As analysts including Squeeze noted, Bitcoin price has held up well and maintained its upward momentum throughout the week, despite the high probability of the Bitcoin Cash hard fork.
For the most part, that is because the vast majority of the industry, its largest businesses, traders, investors and users will be considering Bitcoin Cash as merely an alternative cryptocurrency or altcoin, instead of Bitcoin.
In an open source development ecosystem, developers can free to fork off a project and create their own. Ethereum Classic drifted away from Ethereum, and it has become the sixth largest cryptocurrency in the market. Monero forked off Bytecoin and experienced a major success, becoming the ninth largest cryptocurrency while Bytecoin faded.
Investors or traders of Bitcoin will be credited with Bitcoin Cash due to its development team’s decision to implement replay protection. Some businesses including Bitrefill and Bixin plan to sell Bitcoin Cash and credit users with additional Bitcoin, which Bitcoin Core developers including Peter Todd described as a viable option.