The potential Bitcoin Cash fork in November is looking increasingly likely, with 63% of the last 1,000 BCH blocks being mined using the community’s breakaway Bitcoin Cash Node (BCHN) implementation.
BCHN appears to be ahead on multiple fronts. According to data published by Coin Dance, in total, roughly 82% of the hashrate on the Bitcoin Cash network are currently signaling support for BCHN, following recent support from the BTC.com and Antpool mining pools.
And more than 700 of the Bitcoin Cash network’s 1,262 nodes support BCHN. That compares to just 516 running Bitcoin ABC — the historically dominant implementation of BCH that is spearheaded by core developer Amaury Sechet.
Tensions within the Bitcoin Cash community were reignited in August, when Bitcoin ABC published its proposed, highly controversial ‘Coinbase rule’ that is slated to take effect on November 15.
The Coinbase rule would mandate that miners divert 8% of the BCH contained in new blocks to a development fund unilaterally controlled by Sechet. The notion of a ‘tax’ is anathema to many Bitcoin Cash fans and those opposed have converged in support of BCHN, which plans to fund development through community contributions.
On September 24, crypto asset exchange CoinEx launched futures markets for Bitcoin ABC (BCHA) and BCHN, demonstrating the community’s expectation that a chain split will occur come November. The exchange also announced it will allow users to convert BCH between BCH and BCHN at a 1:1 ratio leading up to the fork.
Discussing the split recently Amaury Sechet told Cointelegraph that BCHN will need to permanently command a dominant share of hashing power in order to survive after the fork takes place:
“BCHN will accept blocks coming from ABC but not the other way around. This means that there will be a fork if BCHN has more hash than ABC, but not the other way around. If at any point in time, the BCH chain becomes longer than the BCHN chain, then the BCHN chain will be wiped out.”