BitMEX just launched a website to make it easier to keep tabs on hard and soft forks on the Bitcoin blockchain.
According to a recent blog post, the research arm of BitMEX is sponsoring a new website, ForkMonitor.info, which is connected to 13 nodes of Bitcoin and its hard forks, most notably Bitcoin Cash.
The website will monitor many different aspects of the networks and their associated blockchains, with the ultimate goal of keeping track of these variables during forks to be “potentially useful in helping to detect unintentional consensus bugs.”
The article says that BitMEX is launching this new website in anticipation of an upcoming hard fork for Bitcoin Cash, which is expected to take place on November 15, 2018.
In fact the head of BitMEX Research, who asked to remain unnamed, told Bitcoin Magazine that, in the short term, the monitor was built to "provide a useful and simple website to track what happens during the Bitcoin Cash hardfork on 15th Nov 2018." For the long term, though, its overarching purpose will be to police the potential bugs and vulnerabilities in Bitcoin's software that updates can introduce.
"The Bitcoin inflation bug discovered in September 2018 was a big concern to us. The bug could have resulted in a long rollback which could have been highly destructive for the industry and BitMEX. The bug was introduced in Bitcoin Core 0.14.0; therefore, those running earlier versions of Bitcoin Core prior to this could have been able to detect the bug. Therefore the idea behind the website is to connect to many old nodes, such that it can be helpful in detecting bugs not present in older versions, but newly introduced. The website is a work in progress and it may introduce more features going forward," he continued.
BitMEX Research took to Twitter to announce its new tool. In the comment section, the company continued to take shots at Craig Wright, whose infamous claiming of Satoshi Nakamoto’s identity has made him a pariah in the industry, for his part in the November 15 fork.
“[Craig Wright’s] (AKA "Fake Satoshi") node, Bitcoin SV, is expected to fork off from the network onto a new chain,” the thread reads.
The Twitter thread went on to explicitly state that the focus of Fork Monitor will be to examine Bitcoin’s network, insinuating that the website’s highest priority isn’t necessarily looking to keep precise notes on Bitcoin Cash and its own forks.
Still, the planned date of the BCH hard fork has given BitMEX ample time to build a functional monitoring website that will eventually gather more hard data. At its current stage, Fork Monitor is something of a pilot project, albeit one that “will hopefully provide useful information to some stakeholders” in the future.
This article was update to provide quotes from the head of BitMEX Research.