BCH forks again; Roger Ver says hard forks could harm the network

The Bitcoin Cash (BCH) network has split into two new blockchains again. A report unveiled this news on November 15, noting that the fork gave birth to Bitcoin Cash ABC (BCH ABC) and Bitcoin Cash Node (BCHN). Reportedly, Binance mined block #661647 as the last common block of the Bitcoin Cash network. AntPool then proceeded to mine the first block that officially separated the network.

According to the report, hashpower has favoured Bitcoin Cash Node (BCHN) more than Bitcoin Cash ABC (BCH ABC). Per data from Coin.Dance, miners have mined 103 blocks under the new consensus rules. However, the BCH ABC network has received little hashpower with only six mined blocks at the time of writing. On the other hand, miners have mined 97 blocks on BCHN. From the above data, analysts believe that there is a strong possibility for BCHN to become the dominant software of the Bitcoin Cash network.

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Reportedly, this network upgrade came after a group of Bitcoin Cash developers dubbed BCH ABC suggested forking of the Bitcoin Cash network. Headed by Amaury  Sechet, the group tabled a contentious Coinbase Rule, which mandates that 8% of all mined BCH be redistributed to BCH ABC to help finance protocol development.

However, another group from the Bitcoin Cash community named Bitcoin Cash Node opposed the network upgrade. As a result, they removed the miner tax from their source code. Seeing as some nodes accepted a hard fork and others didn’t, the Bitcoin Cash network split into two different versions.

Roger Ver says news of forking could have prevented PayPal’s support

Before forking, Roger Ver, the executive chairman of Bitcoin.com, and a renowned BCH proponent noted that he was not a fan of the scheduled network upgrades, which take place every six months.

Ver aired his sentiments in an interview, saying,

“If PayPal knew that this sort of contentious hard fork was likely to happen, maybe they wouldn’t have added bitcoin cash at all to their roadmap. So it is really a big problem to have these contentious hard forks. I’d like to see that come to an end.”

Explaining why hard forks might cause the Bitcoin Cash network serious harm, Ver gave an example of how BCH is less popular than BTC. He said Bitcoin Cash took the name Bitcoin after a hard from Bitcoin, and regardless of this, the network still faces challenges when it comes to marketing, an obstacle that has hindered its mass adoption.

He added that,

“When the split happened, the Bitcoin Cash version had all the characteristics that made Bitcoin popular to begin with, but the other version that didn’t have those characteristics got the Bitcoin name and the infrastructure to go with it. Bitcoin Cash has been rebuilding all of that infrastructure and its brand recognition basically from scratch.”