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This opinion piece on the Bitcoin Cash fork of May 15 was written by Alejandro de la Torre, vice president of Business Operations at BTC.com, the leading digital platform for cryptocurrency users, miners and developers. Follow him on Twitter @bitentrepreneur.
It's another tough day! Today, Bitcoin Cash creates a new blockchain with 32 MB block size limits and added smart contract functionality. This is the third fork that the Bitcoin Cash community has suffered in less than a year, and declares its unqualified commitment to change all that is needed to expand the trading capabilities of their blockchain. Bitcoin Cash strives to provide an inexpensive and fast way to exchange daily payments.
A fork & # 39; hard & # 39; refers to software changes that require the creation of a new blockchain from a previous one, while the & # 39; soft & # 39; fork can impute software updates without creating a new blockchain. A hard range is therefore only implemented when changes need to be made at the most fundamental level of the blockchain architecture: the consensus protocol layer.
Bitcoin Cash was born from a tough fork with the Bitcoin blockchain last summer. After many debates between different parts of the Bitcoin ecosystem on how to extend the Bitcoin network, a group of developers organized under the name of ABC Bitcoin wrote the code to create a new channel of blocks with limits of 8 MB. On August 1, this new code was implemented to copy the entire history of Bitcoin blocks on a new network in order to start extracting its own transactions separately, in as a separate currency and under different parameters of exploration. Bitcoin Cash promises to be a peer-to-peer cash system. This system should be popular in areas where the traditional financial system has not been able to reach unbanked people.
In the case of last summer's hard fork, not only was a new blockchain created, but also a new coin was introduced to the market to represent the value traded on this new trading register. However, not all hard forks create new parts. For example, Bitcoin Cash began again last November to correct its algorithm by adjusting the difficulty of extraction because the network produced extremely fluctuating hash rates.
To patch the system, different teams of developers running different clients on the Bitcoin Cash blockchain have agreed to implement a hard fork where they have all copied the old ledger on a new channel, with the updated software, and abandoned the old chain. Although technically, the month of November was also a "hard" fork, it was obviously very different from the previous split in community generating not only a new blockchain, but also a new network and a new piece.
However, one should not underestimate that blockchain developers, including Bitcoin Cash, treat forcing with caution, it's a delicate process with potentially serious financial consequences. The community deals hard forking with outright fear, it's a key part of how Bitcoin Cash works, so the Bitcoin Cash community is not afraid of hard forks.
This period is closer to the hard fork of November, but slightly different. Today 's fork does not create a new part, or correct an existing problem, but innovates strictly in two ways. The first major change is the tripling of the block size limit from 8 to 32 MB which is a prospective adjustment to allow for a larger transaction throughput per block. I feel better that this block size growth is happening now, while the use of Bitcoin Cash still has ways to grow, rather than later, when the network is at full throttle.
This larger block size gives Bitcoin Cash some leeway, something that other blockchains have sought to address in other ways, e.g. Lightning Network and proof of participation. This makes Bitcoin Cash a bit unique as it attempts to solve the problem of scaling at the consensus protocol layer while maintaining the Proof of Work model.
However, larger blocks will not increase the network in terms of use. It does however offer the possibility of unprecedented growth. The growth of use does not depend on the block size, but more on the community and businesses supporting Bitcoin Cash. Products, services and adoption by merchants are essential. After increasing the size of the blocks, the next advancement proposed by Bitcoin Cash is to add and reactivate old machine script operation codes, or more simply "op codes," which give developers tools to create smart contracts.
These machine codes, called "Satoshi Operation Codes" by the Bitcoin Cash community, allow developers to create different types of metadata implementations. By having the ability to call these functions, developers can create "colored pieces" or representative tokens. These are tokens that can be labeled in a specific way to match bonds, stocks, precious metals, commodities, and any physical or virtual object.
It's hard to say what could come out of this new feature, but if we base our assumptions on what Ethereum was able to accomplish from its second layer implementations, then I believe it will give a lot of Space at Bitcoin Cash. creative and productive ideas to flourish. To this end, we will have to see what the Bitcoin Cash community developers are doing with these new features, and if the market decides to install in this new block size that has not yet been released. l & # 39; scale.
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not represent those of NCC. ©
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