A Bitcoin Cash hard fork will happen on Thursday, November 15th.
Bitcoin Cash is already a hard fork of Bitcoin and has since grown to become the fourth-largest[1] cryptocurrency. Now the digital currency will split in two, creating a second cryptocurrency.
The two digital currencies go by the names Bitcoin ABC, which is the continuation of the current or core Bitcoin Cash, and Bitcoin SV, which will follow new rules and stands for Satoshi’s Vision.
Bitcoin Cash Hard Fork
A hard fork[2] occurs when network participants no longer agree on a proposed change to the running of the blockchain. This change is implemented via a software update.
Participants will decide what they agree with and when the fork happens, those that wish to adapt to the new rules will upgrade to the new software and those that don’t won’t upgrade their network.
The result is a split network[3]. This means two separate blockchains, each running on different rules and with their own currency. Therefore, there will now be two separate digital currencies.
What Happened?
This Bitcoin Cash hard fork has come about after developer Amaury Sechet proposed an upgrade[4] that made a small change to transaction ordering.
An escalating disagreement ensued and two well-known crypto personalities—Roger Ver and Craig Wright—ended up pitted against each other.
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Ver is in support of the new software upgrade (Bitcoin ABC), but Wright favors a move more reflective of the original Bitcoin whitepaper (Bitcoin SV), which seeks to raise the maximum block size to 128MB from 32MB.
