A November Hard Fork Is Expected For Bitcoin Cash

The Bitcoin “family” is likely to see another “divorce.” Bitcoin ABC has proposed a hard fork of the Bitcoin Cash protocol in order to rectify problems associated with the cryptocurrency’s Emergency Difficulty Adjustment (EDA) algorithm, announces CCN.

On August 1, Bitcoin Cash separated itself from the main Bitcoin blockchain, but its network has experienced wild hashrate and block time fluctuations ever since. This happens because the EDA automatically adjusts in response to network conditions to make sure that Bitcoin Cash stays profitable to mine.

Miners are definitely the happiest about this!

However, this leads to a more profitable situation for miners that it should, as they’re able to switch between Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash and therefore exploit the EDA by mining Bitcoin until the Bitcoin Cash difficulty plummets and profitability increases Then, they cause blocks to be found by switching a significant amount of hashpower over to Bitcoin Cash.

In the end, this triggers another EDA, which makes Bitcoin Cash less profitable to mine and users start going back to Bitcoin. BCH was meant to be a cryptocurrency designed to suit everyone, so the fact that its block time increases to an unreasonable amount is dealing a lot of harm to its credibility.

No need to panic, there is a solution!

Bitcoin ABC says that it came up with a solution –  a hard fork that will activate an updated Difficulty Adjustment Algorithm (DAA) that is based on the D601 algorithm developed by Bitcoin ABC’s Amaury Sechet.

For things to get better, DAA is supposed (and needs) to accomplish a lot of goals, including adjusting difficulty to hash rate to target a mean block interval of 600 seconds, avoiding sudden changes in difficulty when hash rate is fairly stable, setting difficulty rapidly when hash rate changes rapidly, evading oscillations from feedback between hash rate and difficulty, and be flexible to attacks such as timestamp manipulation.

Bitcoin Classic revealed that the updated software will be ready to use by November 1 and that the hard fork is supposed to happen on November 13.