Bcash & Coinbase: collusion, manipulation, and FUD
A word of warning:
If you’ve been watching the Bitcoin drama over the past year or so, you’ve probably heard about Bcash (aka “Bitcoin Cash”). I’m not going to go into the details of Bitcoin vs. Bcash, except that I will say this: Bcash is a hostile hardfork, which is an attempt to co-opt the Bitcoin name and brand. In this post, I’ll discuss some of the evidence for this, some of the FUD that Bcash pumpers are using, why they’re shilling their altcoin, and how Coinbase is colluding.
For starters, let’s profile 2 of the prominent figures behind Bcash: Roger Ver, and Jihan Wu.
Roger discussing his altcoin
Roger Ver is a convicted felon, US expatriate, and self-described “first investor in Bitcoin startups” (whether or not this is true I cannot confirm nor deny). He owns bitcoin.com, has more than 400,000 Twitter followers, and frequents Reddit under the name ‘MemoryDealers’, which was also the name of the company from which he first made his riches. He was influential in the early Bitcoin community, and became heavily involved in mining.
Jihan Wu is the cofounder of BITMAIN, a company which produces SHA-256 ASICs, which are used for Bitcoin mining. Today, Bitcoin mining is dominated by ASICs, and the BITMAIN ANTMINER S9 is the preferred choice of miners. Jihan isn’t as active within the community, he prefers to keep a lower profile than Roger, so less is known about this character.
What makes Bcash a hostile hardfork?
There’s a few pieces of evidence to support the claim that Bcash was created with hostile intent. When I say “hostile”, I mean that unlike other Bitcoin forks (of which there are literally thousands), Bcash is attempting to take the Bitcoin name and brand, confuse users, and ultimately destroy Bitcoin as it exists today. Here’s a summary of the things Bcash is doing to destroy Bitcoin:
Using the name “Bitcoin”: this is confusing to users, especially people who are new to Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. To make matters worse, Roger Ver owns bitcoin.com, which is a website that uses its reach to further deliver FUD to the masses. Bcash is not Bitcoin.
Blatantly copying the Bitcoin logo.
Using the same address format as Bitcoin: most forks change their address format to prevent people from accidentally sending their coins to a wallet on a different chain. For example, a number of people have accidentally sent BTC to BCH wallets (or vice versa) and lost their coins forever.
Spreading FUD and lies: this one is a little more subjective, but there’s an entire community of people over on /r/btc on Reddit which appear to have jumped on the Bcash bandwagon and lost their minds. It’s a bizarre place.
Why are Bcashers doing this?
It’s quite simple, really. It’s all about money 💸. Bitcoin’s Segwit upgrade had 2 very important implications:
it fixed a bug in Bitcoin known as “transaction malleability”, which simultaneously disabled an optimization known as ASICBoost
it enabled the development of off-chain scaling technology like Lightning Network
Let’s look a little closer at these points.
ASICBoost is an optimization which significantly improves the profitability of Bitcoin mining, to the order of “up to 30%”. It does this by exploiting a bug in Bitcoin (the transaction malleability bug) to find new blocks faster than other miners. The creator of ASICBoost will only license the technology to certain parties, one of which includes BITMAIN, the largest mining company in China. In other words: Jihan and his company not only control the production of mining hardware, but they run their own mining operations which are 30% more profitable than everyone else. Can you guess why they might not want to upgrade? (hint: 💰) WhalePanda wrote a detailed post about this.
Now let’s talk a bit about Lightning Network (or LN, as I’ll refer to it here). LN is an off-chain scaling solution which can scale well beyond the ~7 transactions per second that Bitcoin is currently capable of. The Segwit upgrade is required to enable LN. Even with Bcash’s block size upgrade (from 1MiB to 8MiB), Bcash is only capable of about 7 x 8 transactions per second, or about ~60 TPS. To put this into perspective, the Visa network processes somewhere around 24,000 transactions per second, with a peak capacity of 56,000 TPS. Aside from being able to scale well beyond 56,000 TPS, LN would provide extremely cheap transactions: far cheaper than they currently are on the Bitcoin network (and also the Bcash network).
Myth: miners are responsible validating blocks. Fact: everyone running a full Bitcoin node is validating blocks, miners merely generate the blocks to be validated
- Read more go by this link
https://hackernoon.com/bcash-coinbase-collusion-manipulation-and-fud-10cba996d769