There’s a bit of noise on the wire this week that Bitcoin Cash is in trouble. Certainly, things look chaotic. A controversial miner tax, which Roger Ver says he didn’t support, and a major SIM card hack has people saying the end is nigh for BCH.
Is Bitcoin Cash In Trouble?
The hack involved a semi-high profile individual, Dreamhost founder Josh Jones. Jones took to Reddit to ask for help. Although he deleted the original post, screenshots were retained.
BREAKING
1M $BCH sim hack!! worth $30M from 1 single Chinese whale (he claimed lost $15M $BTC too) He's now asking for help from miners ..I'm talking with top BCH pool owners on this OMFG
???
BCH address :qzumak2rvxksjgkjuxe2fe5jxatktlsnhy5sthr5p7
THIS IS REALLY BRUTAL pic.twitter.com/19XM3w5BL7
— Dovey 以德服人 Wan ?? (@DoveyWan) February 22, 2020
Dovey Wan, a Twitter personality and a founding partner at Primitive Ventures, had a lot to say on the matter.
I still can't believe it's true HOW COME SOMEONE KEEPS SO MUCH CRYPTO ASSET ON HIS PHONE ???? this is the dumbest thing ever @slowmist @evilcos @ErgoBTC can you guys keep an eye on this incidence?
— Dovey 以德服人 Wan ?? (@DoveyWan) February 22, 2020
She also reportedly wrote:
No matter what, this 60000 $BCH hack, the dispute among BCH camp between Ver and Jihan, all these will mark a slow death of it.
And there is where we disagree.
For a long time, people believed that internal disagreements, the very same ones that led to the creation of Bitcoin Cash, would tear Bitcoin apart. While Bitcoin did suffer, and certainly from the outside it looked like a weird tribalist technology that no one wanted to get involved with, Bitcoin didn’t go anywhere.
Bitcoin Cash is held by many thousands, if not millions, of people who believe in its potential. No one’s going to abandon it over a miner tax or a hack that had nothing to do with Bitcoin Cash.
One Hack Does Not A ‘Slow Death’ Make
Clickbait titles aside, Bitcoin Cash didn’t do anything wrong in the Jones hack. Jones did, by keeping quite that much cryptocurrency on a mobile device. Mobile devices are vulnerable due to potential SIM card hacks – once a SIM card is cloned or spoofed, it can be used to reset access to a cryptocurrency wallet.
Meanwhile, the Bitcoin Cash miner tax might actually go into effect in May, at the protocol level, with some mining pools enforcing it ahead of time.
The mining tax has created an important intellectual divide in the altcoin’s community. Roger Ver and Jihan Wu deeply disagree on the viability of a mining tax. That’s why Ver had to create a video clarifying that he doesn’t support the mining tax at present. Bitcoin.com, Ver’s company, had previously issued a statement saying that the community was not yet in favor of a mining tax.
But as I alluded to above, Bitcoin Cash isn’t going anywhere for the same reasons that Bitcoin didn’t go anywhere. A miner tax is certainly the type of issue that can split a community. It can even lead to a fork, and the chain with the most hashpower will ultimately retain the title of Bitcoin Cash.
Which is the interesting part. If you get one pool (BTC.TOP), whose miners have to hash there voluntarily, and then you get a limited section of the community’s talking heads and developers, do you really have the makings of a whole separate chain?
When Bitcoin Cash split, it had a lot of prominent people in favor of it. Even the most staunch Bitcoin Maximalists, like Luke-Jr, felt that a hardfork was the only viable way forward. In the intervening years, things have progressed nicely for both chains.
Hyperbole From Twitter
As Peter Rizun pointed out and BitStarz News reported, the mining tax may not have enough moral support to amount to a full-blown fork.
2/2 This will test if Bitcoin Cash can avoid being captured by a group of developers. Bitcoin does not have payouts to 3rd parties encoded into its protocol. If exchanges and miners download and run the new version of ABC, BCH will be Bcash with no rights to the name "bitcoin."
— Peter R. Rizun (@PeterRizun) February 15, 2020
What would be the theme of the new version of Bitcoin Cash? In Bitcoin SV, there was a solid community of Craig Wright supporters, but what would people say of their support for the new version?
Bitcoin Cash is open-source software. Anyone can work on it, fork it, change it, and do whatever they like with the code. It seems that, lacking the support of scions like Roger Ver, the new chain might not amount to much other than a cash grab.
The likely outcome is a short-lived hard fork. If the majority of miners, mining pools, and users have no interest in the new economic design, then it will simply fail. Bitcoin ABC will become its own version of Bitcoin Cash – for a while at least.
But, will Bitcoin Cash die a “slow death” as a result of these disagreements, and a single hack?
Well, no. That’s just hyperbole from Twitter.
