The bitcoin community has been on a state of turmoil during the past few months, and even though most bitcoiners felt relieved after the miners confirmed support for the BIP 91, an improvement proposal that furnishes the way for implementation of the “SewWit2x” upgrade, not long before “Bitcoin Cash” came out of the blue, signaling the first ever hard fork along bitcoin’s blockchain since the genesis block was mined in 2009.
So, what do we expect during the upcoming period? Is chaos expected to affect the network? Can we expect a price drop? Will Bitcoin Cash hold its current value after the hard fork actually occurs?
What is Bitcoin Cash All About?
A group of some of the big players across the community, led by Amaury Sechet, were not fully satisfied with the Segwit2x implementation and decided to hard fork bitcoin’s blockchain creating a new altcoin that they named “Bitcoin Cash”, on August 1 at exactly 12:20 UTC. The creators of Bitcoin Cash argue that locking in of the BIP 91 doesn’t necessarily mean that Segwit2x will be implemented successfully and there is still a chance that the “2x” part doesn’t get succesfully deployed, which would render Bitcoin Cash a much better cryptocurrency than Bitcoin proper would then be. So, what is Bitcoin Cash? and how different is it from bitcoin?
There are 2 important changes introduced via Bitcoin Cash:
– The block size is increased to 8 MB
– It rejects SegWit activation which might take place by the end of August
Bitcoin Cash Futures are even now available for trading on Hitbtc and Viabtc. Actually, the altcoin is now trading at $353 and even reached a high of around $556 a week ago.
The new altcoin will be the first coin to have the same transaction history as that of bitcoin, until forking actually takes place. After the fork occurs, anyone who owns bitcoins will have his/her coins on both chains; i.e. if you have 2 Bitcoins, you will have 2 Bitcoin proper coin and 2 Bitcoin Cash coins when forking is completed.
What to Expect After the Hard Fork is Successfully Completed?
Apart from loss with a small portion of the network’s hash power, bitcoin proper will be unaffected by the emergence of the new altcoin “Bitcoin Cash”. Given the fact that all bitcoin holders will receive an amount of Bitcoin Cash equivalent to the amount of bitcoin proper coins they own, a new market that is worth billions of dollars will suddenly appear out of nowhere. Whether or not Bitcoin Cash’s value will last, largely depends on the community’s belief in the technicality of the code behind the new coin and whether or not it will solve bitcoin’s main problems namely scalability.
The value of Bitcoin Cash largely depends on the support of miners and the percentage of hash power that goes off to the altcoin’s new chain. ViaBTC, a Chinese mining firm, currently supports the coin, as it controls around 4% of the network’s hash power, yet for Bitcoin Cash to survive it needs much more support.
Another scenario, which is rather unlikely to happen, is for a large percentage of miners decide to start mining blocks on Bitcoin Cash’s blockchain. This would greatly reduce bitcoin proper’s hash power which would definitely lead to a great drop in bitcoin proper’s value and a rise in bitcoin cash’s price.
How To Get Prepared?
Like we mentioned earlier, if you own an x amount of bitcoins, you will get an equivalent amount of Bitcoin Cash coins after the fork is completed. As such, many investors started selling their altcoins for bitcoin to take advantage of the situation. This led to a powerful bearish wave that took over many altcoin markets, as the prices of many coins took a nosedive throughout the past couple of weeks e.g. ethereum, ripple, monero and others.
So, here is what you should do?
1- IF you have some altcoins that you can sell for bitcoin, do that as soon as possible. If the price of the coins are much lower than they were when you bought them, don’t sell.
2- Move your bitcoins to either:
– A wallet on Kraken or Bitfinex exchanges as they both announced that they will hand their users their bitcoin cash coins.
– A desktop qt wallet , where you would have control over your private keys
– A blockchain.info wallet and extract your private keys using the website’s user interface. It’s easy to do an there are many tutorials out there to help you do it.
