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Bitcoin Cash Network Frozen for Over an Hour in Upgrade Snafu

Bitcoin Cash Network Frozen for Over an Hour in Upgrade Snafu

A scheduled upgrade of the Bitcoin Cash network happened today. Post-upgrade Bitcoin Cash users may have been surprised that their transaction did not confirm promptly. A bug in Bitcoin ABC did not recognize transactions as valid as the count of the number of operations did not correctly flag a transaction as valid.

As a result, ABC nodes did not properly relay transactions, and miners running the ABC software did not confirm any transactions. As a result, no transaction was processed by the Bitcoin Cash network for over an hour. Such an event marks a second Bitcoin Cash upgrade that was not smooth, as the previous upgrade resulted in a chain split.

Why Bitcoin Cash’s upgrade procedure is responsible

After such an event it is helpful to reflect on what processes can be improved to avoid such a snafu. Let us compare a Bitcoin Cash upgrade to a Dash upgrade.

The Bitcoin Cash network announces the date that an upgrade will occur in advance. This puts pressures on developers to release software before it might be ready. Consistent with this change, Bitcoin Cash uses the median time passed (MTP) to signal an upgrade. This means nodes will enforce new rules even if other nodes on the network are not ready. For comparison, Dash upgrades using the method outlined in Dash Improvement Proposal 001. This is based on Bitcoin Improvement Proposal 009. A Dash upgrade requires miners to signal that they are ready to accept the upgrade in blocks. Bitcoin Cash’s MTP method will upgrade even if nodes are not ready.

Dash’s much more careful approach

Because Dash does not announce network upgrades way in advance, they are afforded the time required to be very deliberate and through of their testing. Currently Dash is on release candidate 5 for the planned 0.14 upgrade. For comparison, Dash’s 0.13 release had 11 release candidates before it was released to the network. A global payment network can handle a delayed update. That is a small price to pay for security and reliability.

Published at Wed, 15 May 2019 18:08:28 +0000

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Prepare for a new Bitcoin Fork in 2017.

After the hard fork in the beginning of august, a new cryptocurrency appeared out of nowhere. As you may already know, we are talking about BitcoinCash. If you felt contraried by the hard fork take a seat, as it seems that a new fork will happen this year.

The Segwit2x working group has announced their plans after the upcoming bitcoin Core client 0.15.0 will automatically disconnect nodes supporting the SegWit2x fork.

Extract from the original announcement.

The November 2017 upgrade to 2MB blocks is a hard-fork, but necessary changes are trivial to perform. Some SPV clients are expected to work without any change at all. Most clients will need to tweak only two constants to remain compatible with the new larger blocks.

The main stake of Segwit2x controversial plan is to enlarge the transaction capacity of bitcoin.

What could this mean for bitcoin and how could affect it?

This new fork will create a new bitcoin Blockchain version as well, but the question is wheater it will get support from miners or not. This is one of the most important aspects, without which it’s impossible to thrive. Because of necessity, Segwit2x supporters are keen on splitting the chain once again.

The first signs could be seen in late October but in November, the prices may really become more volatile than ever.
A major impact for the main bitcoin, in the long run, is hard to predict.

In may on New York, after the agreement was signed, SegWit2x group got support from more than 50 companies around the world and more or less 83% of the hashing power. Taking this into consideration, you may think that Segwit2x plan will go smooth but if the mining gets unprofitable, miners could easily change minds and go back to mine the main bitcoin or even bitcoin Cash.

Important to remember is that the signatories of the New York Agreement, are under no obligation to mine exclusively the “2xchain”. This means that Segwit2x will let bitcoin miners choose to run the new software and the keyword here is “profitability”.

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