Bitcoin Cash Has Forked, is this the Hash War or a Stress Test?

The Bitcoin Cash fork was successful… and it looks like Bitcoin Cash ABC is getting spammed with small transactions. Is this the hash war or stress test?

First off, the clearly good news: The fork was successful. ABC and SV now exist. And the software clients Unlimited, ABC, and SV are all running. Blocks are being mined, and SV is mining SV blocks, ABC miners mining ABC blocks, and both mining unlimited. That is what we want to see.

Second, don’t go moving your coins or claiming SV right now. Wait for the dust the settle and wait for exchanges to turn trading back on. There is a lot going on right now, and moving your BCH tokens around isn’t safe. The general advise for now “do nothing.”

Alright, that covered, let’s talk about hash wars and stress tests.

You can see the small transactions on ABC in real time on BlockDozer.com and you can see a tally of information like blocks mined on Unlimited, ABC, and SV in real time on Cash.Coin.Dance. So far ABC has mined more blocks than SV (leading to some to question if ABC lowered the difficulty of mining in their upgrade and/or SV is having problems… although that said, BitMEX looked at the code of both coins and found that ABC was actually twice as difficult to mine currently, so that sheds doubt on that theory).

In terms of the hash war, general worry is that CoinGeek and SV pool, who control a lot of mining power and are behind SV and at odds with ABC, will spam the ABC network and then mine empty blocks (See: After the Fork: How Competing Bitcoin Cash Blockchains Might Wage War).

This would fill up the mempool (pending transactions) with small transactions, and then by mining empty blocks, make it so no transactions can get added to the blockchain. That would then make the blockchain unusable.

That said, so far it is looking like ABC is going much smoother and has more of the hash rate (although a few hours after the fork I did start seeing mostly empty blocks on ABC and not on SV).

Also, I should note I’m seeing the small transactions on all networks. And with that said, many small transactions is also what happens in a “stress test.”

A stress test is when miners send out tons of small transactions to see what blockchains can handle.

One might do this after a hard fork to make sure that everything is working as intended with the new code.

Thus, no conclusions can be drawn at this point without more information.

TIP: Follow the hash wars on HashWar.live.

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