It’s worth remembering that with the Bitcoin fork now underway, as per the official Bitcoin Cash announcement, the criterion for activation of the Bitcoin Cash hard fork is based on “Median Time Past”, or MTP. This means that the chain split will not occur at exactly 12:20 UTC on Aug. 1st, but some time after.
MTP is a statistic calculated over 11 blocks, and trails behind wall clock time by about 6 blocks. This means that the last common block will be approximately the 6th block with a timestamp after 12:20 pm. The block after that will be different on either chain.
Users attempting to split coins, and transact separately on the two networks should be aware of these details in order to properly identify the last common block, and the first post-split block.
For specific technical details, please refer to the User-Activated Hard Fork specification.
Meanwhile, BTC is steady in the $2,800 range at the time of publishing while Bitcoin Cash futures on ViaBTC are trading at $300. It should also be noted that today’s UASF was activated today without a hitch.
Will Bitcoin Cash last for the long term?
A beneficiary of the Bitcoin event sees Ethereum (ETH) performing higher on the day, up double digits to around the $220 level.
Martin Davidson CEO of The Blockchain Centre – a blockchain knowledge hub based in Melbourne commented:
“Bitcoin Cash is merely another altcoin just like Litecoin and hundreds of other cryptocurrencies. It’s basically just a copy of Bitcoins data set transaction history, or its ‘blockchain’ and applying slightly different technicalities to the chain.”
“Those people who have Bitcoins will automatically be given the same amount of the newly created ‘Bitcoin Cash’ Some exchanges are supporting the new coin so people can trade it just like an alt coins are traded.”
“It’s predicted only a small amount of Bitcoin mining power, or hashrate will be pointed at the new Bitcoin Cash blockchain and therefore it is unlikely to have the same level of security, users or value. In fact, the Bitcoin Cash futures market is pricing the new coin at 10% of the value of Bitcoin.”
ZenCash Co-Founder Rob Viglione said:
“Bitcoin scaling has been a complicated issue for the past few years, so it’s nice to see forward progress, even the situation is a bit sloppy. Most participants in the ecosystem will be upgrading with the BIP-91 activation for Segwit2x, but there’s some support for Bitmain’s Bitcoin Cash “User Activated Hard Fork” (UAHF) that launched at 12:20 UTC today.”
“The good news is that we’ll see experimentation along two distinct preference clusters. Rather than forcing one way or another, we can see how each idea unfolds in real life. This is the major advantage of cryptocurrency markets: Instead of bickering over theory and assumptions, we can just bring ideas to market and see how they perform.”
“Still, there are pros and cons to everything. The downside of a split is that Bitcoin loses part of its ecosystem, and network effects are so important to this industry. That said, this isn’t a zero-sum game and it’s more than possible to see both chains flourish in parallel.”
