In order to keep Bitcoin Cash as up to date as possible, its community of developers hard fork the network every 6 months. Most of the time, these updates are smooth and add awesome new features that improve transaction speed and fungibility, while the last hard fork was a little more contentious. Fortunately, in the May 15th hard fork all developers agreed and no new cryptocurrency was created. Let’s take a look at the new features that were added to the Bitcoin Cash network!
Schorr Signatures
Schorr signatures has been added in to the network, which has divided opinions in the BCH camp. In order to keep all developers happy, Schorr Signatures are optional – meaning when sending a transaction, the sender must opt to use Schorr Signatures over the current Elliptical Curve Signatures. In short, Schorr Signatures are a simple way of signing transactions and are virtually untraceable as they obfuscate the public addresses used in the transaction. These new signatures will help Bitcoin Cash users opt to become more private and mask their transaction history. The Bitcoin Cash SV (BSV) brigade dislike Schorr Signatures as it “goes against Satoshi’s intentions” to create a cryptocurrency that’s open and transparent.
Spending Coins in SegWit Addresses
There has been a huge demand from the BCH community to add in this support. Under the old code, BCH that was sent to a P2SH address became unspendable and therefore useless. The latest network upgrade allows for miners to access these addresses and send on the BCH to a valid legacy address when the redeem script pre-image is revealed. In short, anyone who sends BCH to a non-legacy address – an address starting with a 1 or 3 – can now recover their BCH by collaborating with the miners. However, it won’t make recovering Bitcoin sent to a Bitcoin Cash address any easier.
Price Holding Steady
During the hard fork, Bitcoin Cash transactions on exchanges were disabled, meaning the price remained rather flat for a few hours. However, with the last hard fork, we saw the price of BCH increase by more than 35% before the hard fork kicked off. In the days that followed, Bitcoin Cash ABC went on to rise in value while BSV crumbled away. However, this time around there was less media hype about the hard fork and as a result we saw the price only increase around 12%.
Bitcoin Cash has beaten Bitcoin in implementing Schorr signatures, but it’s likely that Bitcoin will follow suit very soon. These bi-annual hard forks keep Bitcoin Cash safe and secure, making it one of the most promising projects around. It’s without a doubt that these new features will go down well with the wider BCH community as more people now have the option to add in extra security by using Schorr Signatures with their transactions.
