A lot of people are paying close attention to the Bitcoin Cash ecosystem right now. That is only normal, as the value of BCH has skyrocketed recently. Moreover, the Bitcoin Cash network recently underwent its first major hard fork in order to address some lingering issues. So far, it seems things are going quite well despite this mandatory upgrade. How all of this will play out for BCH remains to be determined.
Bitcoin Cash Hard Fork Causes no issues
Whenever a hard fork is introduced to any cryptocurrency, there is always a chance of things going awry. If enough nodes don’t upgrade their clients in time, a split of the blockchain could occur at any moment. This is one of the many issues that hindered the Bitcoin Gold launch, as multiple forks were created in the beginning. Thankfully, these issues were resolved shortly afterwards, but they painted a slightly worrisome picture in advance of the Bitcoin Cash hard fork. Thankfully, things went off without a hitch in this regard.
More specifically, the vast majority of network nodes had upgraded to the new client in time to prevent major issues. This hard fork introduces a fair few changes to the BCH protocol, including a new mining difficulty algorithm and rules affecting the reward distribution. We have seen a lot of controversy as far as the Bitcoin Cash EDA was concerned from day one, and it is good to see the developers finally move away from this harmful implementation.
With the hard fork going live Monday night, there were a few tense moments before everything was deemed all right. A few new network blocks were mined in quick succession, indicating everything worked just fine. No blocks were discovered on the non-forked chain after this time, which indicates the upgrade has gone as smoothly as one would expect. Although a competing cryptocurrency could theoretically have been created during this fork, that never happened in the end.
Since the fork went live, we have seen Bitcoin Cash’s block time being reduced somewhat. More specifically, in the hours prior to the fork, there were a few concerns regarding the time between blocks. With gaps of up to an hour at times, this problem had to be addressed sooner or later. With the new fork, it seems most blocks are between 10 and 20 minutes apart. It will take some time until everything falls into place, but for now, things are looking pretty solid, all things considered.
One thing that has become somewhat apparent is that most of the network blocks are a lot smaller in size than they used to be. Prior to the fork, we saw a few multi-megabyte blocks hit the network without any issues. Of all blocks mined in the 10 hours prior to this article’s creation, no block came even close to being 1 MB in size. This is an interesting development that is well worth keeping an eye on. It makes some people wonder why the 8MB block size increase was necessary to begin with, as it seems overkill for the network in its current state.
All things considered, the Bitcoin Cash hard fork was a much smoother upgrade than most people had anticipated. It is good to see major upgrades like this one go off without a hitch, especially when considering how easily things could have gone south. How all of this will affect the Bitcoin Cash price and network in the long run remains to be determined. For now, things are firing on all cylinders, but the main challenge remains overtaking Bitcoin as the top cryptocurrency. That uphill battle is far from over, to say the very least.
