Bitcoin is 24x7: Why BitPay Didn’t Stop for the Bitcoin Cash Fork
BitPay was one of a very few Bitcoin companies that chose to remain operational through the Bitcoin Cash (BCC) hard fork. We wanted to explain why.
This was a risky decision for us because all of the exchanges on which we trade decided to suspend deposits and withdrawals for a period of time. It meant that we could be accepting Bitcoin payments while accumulating liabilities in fiat currencies without an ability to transfer those Bitcoin to exchanges to sell.
While we expected volatility in the BTC price around the BCC fork, we expected the network itself to remain perfectly operational. At worst we thought blocks might slow down a bit (they didn’t). We can’t blame the exchanges for taking extra precaution, but we really felt there was no reason for them to shut down. We tried to convince a few to remain fully operational through the Bitcoin Cash fork. We were not successful, but we decided to remain open anyway.
At BitPay, our goal is to keep our systems operational 100% of the time. Bitcoin is a great platform for us partially because it has maintained near 100% uptime since 2009. I say near 100% because there have been a few deep chain re-orgs stemming from bugs that caused a distruption in the system (at least for some network participants).
Deep chain re-orgs are a network interruption. While re-orgs 1 or 2 blocks deep are expected and common (and inherent in the design of proof-of-work consensus), deeper re-orgs are a symptom of some underlying issue. In the past, it has usually been due to a bug that caused some segment of the network to diverge from the rest. Network partitioning itself can also cause deep re-orgs. Activist/minority led deployment of consensus changes also have the potential to lead to such splits and deep re-orgs.
Our goal as a community should be to maintain 100% uptime for the Bitcoin network, including the avoidance of disruptive, deep chain re-orgs. Miners and pools should evaluate software with this objective in mind and avoid deploying upgrades that could lead to such network interruption. If Bitcoin fails to maintain this near 100% availability, its value will likely be diminished. Fortunately, all incentives are aligned to continue this excellent track record, but it is not guaranteed and it won’t happen unless miners and pools pay attention to this important objective.
Stephen Pair is CEO at BitPay, the leading payment technology provider for the Bitcoin block chain and maker of the highly-rated BitPay — Secure Bitcoin Wallet. BitPay also leads development of the Bitcore and Copay open source projects. You can get in touch with @spair and @BitPay on Twitter.
