So… Aug 1 is here. Supposedly Bitcoin has forked into BitCoin “Cash” (a stupid cheesy name if you ask me). But how do we know that this fork has happened, and what are the potential side effects of it? Here is my novice interpretation of the available data…
The above image is from https://www.btcforkmonitor.info/ a site that checks for divergences in the bitcoin nodes. Today, Aug 1, the “BitCoin ABC” node turned blue. It’s current block height is different than the others. On some level, clearly a split has a occurred. However, there are other interesting interpretations that can be made with this data.
Primarily, nobody is issuing any transactions on the fork. The block height has stayed the same for quite a while now. I’m not even sure what the purpose of mining it is when there’s no transactions to add to the ledger. In fact, there are so few transactions, that the node is merely listed as “behind” other nodes according to the website. I interpret this as meaning that it hasn’t truly officially forked. In order to truly fork, new transactions need to send the block chain on a completely new path… and with nobody trading it, it basically just sits there… idle… behind everyone else. There no evidence of activity of people buying and trading. There appear to be wallets for transactions, but no trades, just futures at the moment. I found a shady-looking 3rd-party wallet called “Electron Cash”. It doesn’t even appear to synchronize the blockchain. On so many levels, BCC seems to be an incomplete protest that has a lot of uphill battling to do if it wants to take over the main blockchain.