Which is the Real Bitcoin?
Author: CY_vpAv (Published on May 01, 2019 19:35 in 8btc.com)
Translator:FCH翻译小组- rymd
The heated debate on which is the real Bitcoin occurred ever since the inception of BCH on August 01, 2017 after the hard fork of Bitcoin. Recently, another round of debate arises among crypto lovers from within the country and abroad.
Origin
The controversy first started after BTC supporters requested twitter account @bitcoin to be banned. This account was created by one of the early BTC supporters on August 2011. Just like other big block size supporters, the unwillingness of Bitcoin’s core to increase the block size caused @bitcoin to join BCH community after the fork.
Besides @bitcoin, other early BTC supporters such as Bitcoin.com’s owner, Roger Ver, and BTC.com’s owner, Jihan Wu, also decided to change sides and join BCH community. Meanwhile, the BCH community also received support from BCH subreddit r/btc, which was created and maintained by a group of BTC supporters who were previously banned from the subreddit r/bitcoin because having block size scaling discussion.
Most of the BCH supporters think that BCH is the real Bitcoin because:
1. BCH increased the block size limitation from 1M to 8M, which is formerly advocated by Satoshi Nakamoto.
2. BTC was dominated by Core implemented Segregated Witness (SW) or SegWit in August 2017. Huge adjustment was made to both its transaction structure and block structure, and thus changing its underlying technology.
3. Core refused main blockchain scaling. Instead, they moved the payment function from the main chain to lightning network. BTC’s main chain has now become a transaction settlement system through SegWit and Lightning Network (LN). This goes against Bitcoin’s “peer-to-peer electronic cash system” development direction.
4. During the scaling debate, Core chose to ignore the agreement achieved in Hong Kong and New York Roundtable Consensus meeting by all parties in ecology. They did not recognize the decision voted by more than 80% to hash rate and keep maintaining its development route on small block + lightning network. All this violated the decentralization characteristics of Bitcoin.
5. The route of developing a small block settlement network changes Bitcoin’s economic model. For example, after few times of Bitcoin halving, the reward of mining new block will become less. Supposedly, with bigger block size, larger amounts of transaction fees will be generated to compensate the reduced of reward from mining. This becomes difficult to achieve with a small block network approach.
Therefore, BCH supporters believe that only BCH will be able to serve the original Bitcoin purpose in terms of technical, economy, and decentralized framework. BTC lead by Core has deviates from its former direction.
Not all BCH supporters think that “BCH is the real Bitcoin”. For example, Jihan Wu proposed that “BTC is BTC, BCH is BCH”, each of them should have their own development path in early 2018. This did not receive much positive feedback in BCH community. I analyzed the Bitcoin related economy issues myself since 2013 and found that some important logistics were no longer valid after Core decided to change direction on the economic model. Therefore, I also agreed that BCH is the original Bitcoin.
However, the conflict in November 2018 within the BCH community in the country led us to see things differently. The answer of “Which is the real Bitcoin?” becomes less important and self-development is what matters most. Resulting from this serious dispute, BSV was born and they intensely claimed that “BSV is the real Bitcoin”.
BSV was born from the unexpected political attack on the BCH community. After BCH was running stable and smoothly, Craig S. Wright (CSW) proclaimed himself as Satoshi Nakamoto, with the support of casino owner Calvin Ayre and a team of lawyers led by Jimmy, and joined the BCH community. They invested a large amount of money for the purpose of promoting BCH, application investment, conducting competitions, building mining farm, and so on. CSW also actively interacted with the Chinese community and managed to gain a lot of support within short period of time.
In August 2018, CSW and his followers started to attack Team ABC (BCH’s main developer), Bitmain, Coinex, and others vigorously. They released new version, named BSV on August 30 and threatened to declare hash war if BSV was not used to replace ABC and all other compatible version. This then led to the BCH civil war.
During this civil war, CSW gained a lot of support from BCH community in terms of commercial investment, political operations, and mass media. The main reason is that he took advantage of the conflict between BCH and Core. He tried to simplify the conflict without further elaboration, labelling those who opposed them with all kind of labels, and being extreme in their proposition were among the tactics used by the CSW faction. They insisted:
1. Increasing block size immediately without delay. They criticized BCH’s proposal to increase block size step by step according market demands as opposing block size scaling.
2. Regressing to Satoshi Nakamoto’s 0.1 version. They think team ABC and Core both ruined the initial framework of Nakamoto.
3. Same as Core, team ABC is technical dictator who needs to be eliminated and replaced.
Last, most importantly, CSW strongly claimed that he is the real Satoshi Nakamoto and BSV is the real Bitcoin. However, instead of providing Satoshi Nakamoto’s original private key signature as a solid evidence to prove his identity, he doubtfully used a series of indirect evidence to persuade others to believe him.
Through confusion caused by simplifying the conflict, malicious labelling, and deification, BSV managed to obtain large number of hardcore supporters in BCH community, especially those who worshiped Satoshi Nakamoto and have strong faith in Bitcoin‘s whitepaper. These hardcore supporters then became main force of BSV community.
On the other hand, those who remain in BCH community are more pragmatic and rational. These people find that CSW’s proposal to regress back to Satoshi Nakamoto’s early version is unacceptable, and they were also dissatisfied with the arrogance of CSW faction and the way they treated other people and altcoins. They felt uncomfortable and antipathy with CSW that he proclaimed himself as Satoshi Nakamoto and the way CSW’s supporters deifying him. They also disagreed with centralized control by CSW’s faction.
After the split, the BSV community came out their fundamentalism version of “BSV is the real bitcoin”. Different from BCH community’s version which focus on market demands and peer-to-peer electronic cash system, BSV insisted there can only be one blockchain, and that BCH and BTC must be destroyed. BSV then declared war on both BCH and BTC community. On the contrary, BCH supporters always emphasize on peace no matter before or after the hash war. They believed the fork process should be carried out peacefully and each should focus on their own development after the fork.
After the heated block size and hash war, radical and extreme ideology basically eliminated from BCH community, and those who decided to stay are more pragmatic and rational. The idea of “BTC is BTC, BCH is BCH” and each should focus on their own development proposed by Jihan Wu now gained large support from Chinese community, but overseas community including Roger Ver and @bitcoin who dedicated to promote Bitcoin since the early days still insisting that BCH is the real Bitcoin. Despite this small disagreement, both communities understand and support each other.
So, which is the real Bitcoin then?
According to the recent years’ debates, standard of finding the answer can be viewed from few aspects:
1. Decide by hash rate.
Based on basic understanding of proof-of-work (POW), hash rate is power, and the longest chain is the main chain. Which blockchain has the highest hash rate, Bitcoin or BTC? But this is not convincing, and BCH supporters controlled more than 60% of BTC and BCH total network hash rate at the birth of BCH, but BCH did not become Bitcoin or BTC.
2. Decide by market value.
BTC, BCH, and BSV have similar liquidity, price, and market value and are unanimous. Currently, BTC’s price and market value far greater than the others, this seems to be the aspect of defining which is the real Bitcoin. But, let say one day BCH market value is greater than BTC, will the whole market start to change the way they address BTC and BCH? I am afraid not, this is not convincing.
3. Decide by Satoshi Nakamoto.
CSW and his supporters thought by claiming CSW is Satoshi Nakamoto, it is legitimized to declare BSV is real Bitcoin. Because of this, they radically proposed to regress back to the earlier version. The BCH community emphasized they are the ones developing in accordance to the direction of Satoshi Nakamoto and whitepaper. Core and its supporters generally accepted the fact to change from peer-to-peer electronic cash system to store of value and settlement function. I’m afraid even if the real Satoshi Nakamoto show himself now, he can’t change BTC’s name.
4. Decide by domain name.
During the hash war, some people thought that domain name is an important traffic entrance to gain more users, which will then help determine the naming process. In fact, the most important domain name is owned by Core’s opponents. For example, Bitcoin.com owned by Roger Ver, btc.com owned by Jihan Wu, and bitcoin.org owned by Cobra who constantly criticizes Core. This aspect too doesn’t change the fact that Bitcoin or BTC is still dominant by Core.
5. Decide by users.
It seems to be reasonable that the naming decision lies in the hand of users. Let the market decide and apparent effect will eventually show the results when users invested money on the coin they support. The problem with this is that most users do not truly understand the details of the conflict happened and they are too scattered. This will prevent more reasonable and decisive conclusion on the naming process.
6. Decide by commercial branding.
During the birth of BCH and BSV, popular commercial application used by users such as exchanges, wallets, blockchain explorers, market price websites, and so on played an important role in naming process. All these commercial parties link through almost all the users which will surely influence the people acceptance on naming process.
Although commercial branding is very important, they are highly centralized and not coordinated unanimously. They considered various situations during the fork process, mainly looking at the overall strength from both sides and how they can attract more users. At the time when BCH was born, the gap between both sides was too obvious then BCH finally decided to use new name.
During the BCH hash war, BSV initial intention was to take over the BCH codename from ABC version. At that time, they both had similar strength. BSV gained support from its idea of regressing back to Satoshi Nakamoto’s early whitepaper version. Whereas Team ABC supporters controlled popular domain name and more hash power. When the war started, hash rate, price, and media publicity became battlefield. Then, with the advantage of hash rate, mass support from market, and hardcore supporters, ABC chain was leading in the war and successfully retain its codename BCH after the lead was recognized by main exchanges such as Huobi, Gate.io, and others.
After that, ABC incorporated restructure protection to eliminate the possible threat by CSW’s 51% attack, and forced CSW faction to finally give up “BCH” and use “BSV”. Despite this outcome, some exchanges including Binance and bitfinex still keep the “BCHABC” or “BAB” codename, but this does not cause any trouble on the naming of “BCH” and “BSV” in overall market.
To summarize, if there is any fight for the codename during any conflicts, various factors involved may have impact on both sides. These will be reflected in naming of user’s application such as exchanges, wallets, browsers, etc. Once the conflict or dispute is settled, it is difficult to regain the codename that is already widely used by the market.
No matter BCH or BSV, the purpose of declaring they are the real Bitcoin is mainly to prove their legitimacy and to prove that their direction or route are the closest one to the original Bitcoin. In order to gain more recognition from cryptocurrency lovers who recognized Bitcoin as the world currency, BCH chose to emphasize on path that matches the direction of Bitcoin. However, BSV wanted to focus on matching all aspects of Bitcoin. Instead of regaining the name of Bitcoin, which is rather difficult, they should pay more attention and focus on their own market competency.
