Bitcoin Cash (BCH), Bitcoin SV, Cryptocurrency–As the cryptocurrency markets continue to slip into another day of price fall, with headlines across the internet declaring Black Friday savings for Bitcoin and altcoins, the BCH fiasco encapsulated in the recent “hash war” is finally coming to an end.
While the original Bitcoin Cash was at the center of a naming controversy when it split from Bitcoin Core in August 2017, with BCH figurehead Roger Ver claiming the coin to be the true iteration of Bitcoin, the subsequent hard fork on Nov. 15th has been far more contentious. The resulting factions from Bitcoin Cash, named Bitcoin ABC and Bitcoin SV, have been at one another’s throat since the split, with supporters of each doing their best to besmirch and tear down the other–with the ultimate loser being the entire industry of cryptocurrency. Similar to the earlier split of BTC and BCH, both coin communities and developers wanted to claim the “official” title of Bitcoin Cash, thereby holding sway over the majority of investor interest and brand appeal. However, the lack of consensus across the industry–a combination of exchange support, developer weight and algorithmic hash production–led to an ongoing conflict where by both parties suffered.
Craig Wright, one of the primary supporters of Bitcoin SV, instigated a campaign against Bitcoin Cash (and subsequent rival fork Bitcoin ABC) to claim the legitimacy of the BCH lineage and impose his vision for the future of the currency’s blockchain and protocol. However, a new development on Nov. 23 has the coin and it’s supporters surrendering the name of Bitcoin Cash in an effort to move past the senseless nature of the hash war.
Billionaire SV representative Calvin Ayre, in a post on Coingeek, capitulated the ongoing conflict to Bitcoin ABC, claiming that their community “no longer [wants] the name Bitcoin Cash,” and will move forward with an independent blockchain and version of their of network. Despite scrapping their plan to be the representative currency of Bitcoin Cash, Ayre and his supporters view the development as positive for Bitcoin SV. Speaking in an email with Bloomberg, Ayre continues,
“We have a clearly defined path and this is now ready for implementation. Our definition of winning is SV existing, which was not what ABC wanted, and we are already moving on to grow the ecosystem.”
While it’s hard to pin the entire market drop on BCH and the hard fork that followed, the coin played a role in the demise of Bitcoin valuation over the past week. BCH prices pumped over 20 percent in the days leading up to the fork, creating a mild resurgence in the broader crypto markets. However, the price pump was short lived. Market uncertainty over the future of the Bitcoin Cash split and the ramifications for the broader industry led investors to abandon the coin in droves, leading to a sell off that extended to BTC and all other top currencies. The end result was $50 billion wiped from the market capitalization of cryptocurrency in a span of days, and little end in sight for the severe downturn in valuation after months of relative price stability.
