Crypto Traders Now See No Winner in Bitcoin Cash Fork

Early trading indicates crypto investors may no longer believe Bitcoin ABC, today the dominant software used to run the bitcoin cash blockchain, will hold on to its leading position following an expected fork tomorrow.

At press time, exchange markets set up in advance to offer traders a choice between Bitcoin ABC and its expected challenger, Bitcoin SV, show Bitcoin ABC has lost its early edge. After trading for more than $300 above the price of Bitcoin SV, data shows Bitcoin ABC, represented by the ticker symbol BCHABC, is now nearly trading at parity.

Data shows coins on a hypothetical BCHABC blockchain are now trading at $253, while those on a BCHSV blockchain are priced at $216, according to Poloniex.

At 9:00 UTC, BCHSV was even briefly the price leader, a significant development considering the price of BCHABC was 10 times higher than BCHSV on Nov. 9th, when they were trading at $540 and $55 respectively.

In fact, BCHABC was able to maintain a price nearly four times higher up until yesterday, when BCHSV’s investor interest significantly started to significantly increase.

BCHSV has amassed nearly double the 24-hour trading volume as BCHABC on Poloniex, registering over $3 million in volume while BCHABC is recording just $1.23 million.

All of this follows the decision by popular cryptocurrency exchange, Poloniex to launch an experimental market they termed ‘pre-fork trading’ where placeholder token for BCHABC and BCHSV could be traded in order to allow the community to decide which blockchain it will support.

Bitfinex launched a similar market yesterday, which introduced Chain Split Tokens (CSTs) that allow traders to trade tokens representing value on each of the competing blockchains that could result from tomorrow’s fork. 

Mining moves

A key drive of this change is that more mining pool operators are supporting Bitcoin SV, meaning that its blockchain could have more dedicated computing power securing transactions. 

As seen on CoinDance, the two major mining pools in support of Bitcoin SV – SVPool and CoinGeek – currently hold roughly 60 percent of the total hash power now dedicated to bitcoin cash. Plus, other mining pools that support Bitcoin SV bring the total hash power towards that implementation to a little over 78 percent.

This number is up from 76 percent yesterday and 73.6 percent earlier in the week.

The numbers suggest those supporting Bitcoin SV could even have enough computing power so as to launch attacks on a Bitcoin ABC, should a minority of computers continue to support that network. Such a move has been suggested by Bitcoin SV project leaders, including Craig Wright, the Australian cryptographer who claims to be Satoshi Nakamoto and who is leading development of Bitcoin SV. 

That being said, Peter Rizun, chief scientist at Bitcoin Unlimited, another implementation for bitcoin cash, believes the hash power numbers may look different after the hard fork is actually activated and those dedicating computing power to the network are forced to actually allocate resources. 

Rizun told CoinDesk:

“I think their estimate is probably reasonable for right now … There is a huge pool of hash power mining [bitcoin] that can come over to [bitcoin cash] when the time is right.  Don’t read too much into the [percentages] right now.”

Disclosure: The author holds BTC, AST, REQ, OMG, FUEL, 1st and AMP at the time of writing.

bitcoin fork image via Shutterstock