Roger Ver and his ABC team appear to be the clear winner in the Bitcoin Cash hash war, as Craig Wright and Calvin Ayre – along with their SV team – have fallen massively behind. At one-point ABC was more than 50 blocks ahead of the SV team, leading many to declare ABC as the true Bitcoin Cash.
According to stats from Coin Dance, ABC is commanding around 60% of the total network hashrate, with 68% of nodes and between 75% and 99% of company support. SV currently has 39% of total network hashrate, 19% of network nodes and a company support of between 46% and 48% – it’s not looking good for SV and Wright’s outrageous claims.
Vin Armani Predicting the End of Crypto as we Know it
Last week, Vin Armani – CTO of CoinText.io – predicted that Wright and Ayre were planning the end of the crypto world as we know it. In his ramblings, Armani said that the SV team would be the clear winner of the hash war and launch an attack on ABC to render their miners powerless. While SV did attempt to do this, it was done with very little power and ABC managed to survive the “attack” – if you can even call it that.
It turns out that Armani was totally wrong about Wright and Ayre’s ability to create a powerful crypto network. In fact, the duo couldn’t even take over Bitcoin Cash, let alone the rest of the crypto world – don’t quit your day job, Vin.
Huge Blocks Coming From SV
Bitcoin SV has been mining some insanely huge blocks – probably why it’s so far behind – when compared to virtually every other blockchain. The largest block in the last 24 hours was a whopping 26MB – 26,000 KB – compared to ABC’s biggest block of 9MB – 9,000 KB.
All of SV’s blocks are well into the thousands of kilobytes, while ABC’s blocks are averaging below 10 kilobytes. The bigger the block, the longer it takes to propagate around the network – unless the miners are also the node. This is highly undesired when it comes to crypto mining, as it makes the mining process centralized – something that Satoshi wouldn’t have wanted.
You have to factor in latency – the time it takes for data packets to travel through the internet to the other nodes – as a strain on the network speed and ability to grow. If you have a medium latency – around 100 ping – it will take around 100 milliseconds per kilobyte to send data to the entire network. Now, imagine the time difference in speed between sending 26,000 kilobytes and 9,000 kilobytes – sending less means faster propagation and therefore the better blockchain.
You can reduce the latency equation if you’re sending the block to yourself as the node, which means that essentially the miners control the entire network. This makes a centralized environment and isn’t something that the crypto community would appreciate – just look at the amount of hate Ripple gets for this same issue. Just the average block size alone is enough to declare ABC as the winning side in the hash war.
ABC Took a Very Early Lead
Craig Wright posted a Tweet saying that SV had mined the first block and was ahead, but that was the end of the party for SV. Shortly after his Tweet went live, ABC diverted an insane amount of power to mining on its chain and took back the lead. Peaking at just under 9,000 PH/s, ABC was committing more power than SV could muster and this helped ABC take a commanding lead.
Since it took the lead, ABC hasn’t fallen behind SV at any point. In fact, the gap between the two networks was more than 50 blocks at one point. At time of press, SV has managed to pull it back to around 20 blocks, but ABC suffered a loss of more than 3,000 PH/s, which enabled SV to catch up slightly.
In all this no user transactions are lost.
And… SV is ahead. pic.twitter.com/wiZUROWbBm
— Dr Craig S Wright (@ProfFaustus) 15 November 2018
Great News for Bitcoin Miners
Due to the great Bitcoin Cash hash war, Bitcoin miners have been able to mine Bitcoin much more efficiently. BTC and BCH both use the SHA-256 algorithm, so miners can easily swap between mining the two cryptos. However, at the height of the hash war, it was 75% more cost effective to mine Bitcoin over Bitcoin Cash due to the insane amount of hash power that was being diverted to the BCH network. Yet, lower prices of Bitcoin did hurt miners slightly, but not enough to create a negative cost environment for BTC miners.
It’s All About the Money
Before the hard fork, there were a lot of people in the crypto community dying to get their hands on Bitcoin SV, but they are likely regretting that decision now. Due to the fact that SV has all but lost the has war, its price is lingering around the $120 mark – down from a high of $243. On the other hand, ABC is currently heading to the moon with a price of $267 – up 8.69% in the past 24 hours. This is great news for all ABC holders, as their Bitcoin Cash is slowly starting to return to its original values. The value of ABC is only going to increase more as Craig Wright and Calvin Ayre finally admit defeat – or the crypto exchanges declare the winner for us.
SV has yet to throw in the towel and crypto exchanges are yet to declare ABC as the winner – listing ABC as Bitcoin Cash – but it’s very clear that this is how things will end up. ABC is very clearly the better of the two networks and is winning this hash war by a country mile. It’s only a matter of time before Wright and Ayre decide to throw in the towel after mining their Bitcoin SV at a massive loss.
