Bitcoin SV (BSV) and Bitcoin Cash (BCH) seem to have established settled mining hashrates following their halvings, both some 50% lower than pre-halving levels. These hashing levels have been keenly watched by those on both sides of the ex-Bitcoin battleground, with insults being traded in the interim, but with everything now stabilizing on thing is clear – nobody has come out of this a winner.
Crashes All Round
BCH performed its first halving last Wednesday and immediately saw a 60% hashrate drop, from 3.6 exahashes to 1.45 in 48 hours. The rate has now stabilized at around 1.6 exahashes, still around 60% lower than its average pre-halving rates.
BSV has come out of the hashrate battle worse, at least for now, suffering a 70% drop in its hashrate post-halving and stabilizing a little below BCH at 1.4 exahashes – 53% lower than its pre-halving average.
In purely statistical terms then there is very little to separate the pair, and in fact they are closer now than previously – there are only 0.2 exahashes separating the two rivals, whereas before BSV was 0.6 exahashes behind.
No Surprise in Results
The hashrate drop surprised nobody in the space as miners abandoned the two projects and moved over to more profitable mining ventures such as Bitcoin, showing little loyalty to the projects themselves.
The BSV and BCH camps themselves have naturally either ignored the drop in hashrate or have been quick to dismiss its importance, with BSV backer Calvin Ayre stating that “hash is the wrong metric to be looking at for health” and that transaction volume is the right metric to use instead (he won’t like to know therefore that BSV’s transaction volume has collapsed from 5.2 million to 200,000 this month, although the halving is probably responsible for this so we’ll let him off this once).
For all the congratulations and oddly ceremonial atmosphere generated by BCH and BSV fans over their respective halvings, what we have seen so far is the hashrates dive to almost dangerous levels and the prices tank. Maybe they know something we don’t…
