
Relative hashpower of BTC and BCH in percentage of total - ojr
http://fork.lol/pow/hashrate
======
sbenitoj
The headline is incorrect, the graph shows the RELATIVE hashrate of Bitcoin
and Bitcoin Cash.

The absolute hashrate of the Bitcoin network is still increasing [0].

All this chart demonstrates is that the hashrate of Bitcoin Cash is increasing
faster than the hashrate of Bitcoin.

This also means that NEW hashing power is coming online, not that hashing
power is necessarily switching from Bitcoin to Bitcoin Cash (even if it's
currently more profitable to mine Bitcoin Cash than Bitcoin [1]).

[0]
[https://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty](https://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty)

[1] [https://cash.coin.dance/blocks](https://cash.coin.dance/blocks)

~~~
cesarb
> even if it's currently more profitable to mine Bitcoin Cash than Bitcoin

It seems that is the case if you consider only the block reward, but not if
you also consider the transaction fees:
[http://fork.lol/reward/blocks](http://fork.lol/reward/blocks)

The BTC chain has more transactions per block than the BCH chain, and the per-
transaction fee is also higher.

~~~
TD-Linux
No, it's still more profitable to mine BCH even considering the transaction
fees, see the home page of fork.lol: [http://fork.lol/](http://fork.lol/)

The graph you linked is not considering block difficulty.

------
j_s
My ignorant TL;DR: BCH may temporarily more profitable in part because
hardware goes a lot further against the reduced difficulty. As more miners are
attracted to BCH, the difficulty should theoretically balance in correlation
with the "in-practice"/exchangeable value of BCH.

Clicking on the 'difficulty' tab seems to confirm this:

[http://fork.lol/pow/difficulty](http://fork.lol/pow/difficulty)

\--

I barely remember some mention of (at least the potential for) miners
cooperating to reduce the difficulty for BCH after the fork. If I'm
understanding this right (unlikely!), the relative hashpower is a pretty bad
metric for comparison unless difficulty is also factored in?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14901033](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14901033)

\--

I personally use the open source NiceHash client to earn what currently works
out to $.06/day with a single older desktop GPU (thanks "free" internet +
electricity!) because I don't want to be bothered with micro-managing to point
the infinitesimally small fraction of mining power I experiment with in the
optimal direction.

~~~
pmorici
The difficulty re-targets once every 2016 blocks. Bitcoin Cash (BCH) has a
added feature that re-targets the difficulty downward if blocks are being
found too slowly. Bitcoin's Legacy chain doesn't do this so if enough hash
power leaves the legacy chain in a short period of time it causes slow block
times and people hope that if it gets bad enough there will be an inflection
point where people abandon the legacy chain for Cash. The likely hood of that
happening is anyone's guess.

[0] [https://medium.com/@jimmysong/bitcoin-cash-difficulty-
adjust...](https://medium.com/@jimmysong/bitcoin-cash-difficulty-
adjustments-2ec589099a8e)

~~~
tradersam
That downward adjustment is total bs, and can enable (like is happening
currently) a scenario where miners lower their hashpower for ~12 hours, the
difficulty drops, and they all pile back on and get ~2 minute blocks for 2016
blocks and earn a shit ton of money.

------
alextheparrot
Can anyone comment on what is driving this? I read an article about it being
more profitable to mine Bitcoin Cash a few days ago, but as with most of these
cryptocurrency releases I find it tough to separate the marketing from the
truth.

~~~
tylersmith
In this case it is the truth. The price of Bitcoin Cash is going up and the
difficulty to mine had been going down. So for now, it is more profitable. It
will likely go back in forth for a while before there's a dominate winner.

~~~
exit
this view suggests the difficulty of bch will increase by ~220% in ~3 days:
[http://fork.lol/pow/retarget](http://fork.lol/pow/retarget)

which i think will inversely affect profitability?

~~~
tylersmith
Yep. As it becomes more profitable more people mine, the difficulty goes up,
profitability goes down, people stop mining, difficulty goes down, and so on.

------
grabcocque
I was under the impression, it was miners that by and large were in favour if
segwit and everything that goes along with it. Part of point of Cash was to
try to reduce the influence of miners on the currency. So my guess is it's
just bet-hedging for now.

~~~
sbenitoj
That's incorrect - in general the miners are opposed to SegWit, but they
accepted a compromise of agreeing to SegWit if they could increase the block
size to 2 MB (from 1 MB currently). SegWit will be activated within 24 hours,
but Bitcoin Core (the main developers of current Bitcoin code) have already
said they are not going to support an increase to 2 MB blocks. They also claim
they never agreed to it in the first place.

As a result, it's very likely to see another hard fork to 2 MB in November, so
there will be 3 chains with a shared transaction history, and most like all
will claim to be the real Bitcoin -- personally I don't think debating which
one is the "real" one is worthwhile, just use the one you want, but eventually
it's likely that one chain will get the majority of hashing power and have a
much higher price per token than all the others.

~~~
makomk
The Bitcoin Core developers were never part of the agreement to hard-fork and
increase the block size - they've said it was a terrible idea all along at
least on the time scale proposed. I don't think they even knew about it until
it was publicly announced. Also, SegWit increases the block size to 2-ishMB by
itself (it's complicated, because older nodes need to think blocks are still
under 1MB, which is done by stripping out parts of SegWit transactions when
sending to them). This means that in practice the hard fork gives a block size
of 4-8MB.

The "compromise" framing of "we gave you SegWit, now you have to give us a
hard fork" is pretty terrible too, because the two aren't symmetrical - SegWit
makes hard forking less urgent, but hard forking to increase the block size
makes the SegWit improvements more important because they're designed to make
larger blocks work better. Even Bitcoin Cash copied one of the key SegWit
improvements, the transaction hashing change, in very slightly modified form
for this reason.

~~~
pmorici
There is a good explanation on reddit of the history of this. [0] The Core
developers did agree to a block size increase though in what is commonly
referred to as the Hong Kong Agreement. They didn't follow though on that
agreement and made up some truly weaselly excuses for why.

More recently a large group of players in the space came together and agreed
to what has come to be called the New York Agreement (NYA) This said that they
would support Segwit and a 2MB hard fork for bigger blocks. Core and
Blockstream who largely controls Core have ignored the NYA and worked against
it. They are pretending like segwit has support w/o the 2MB block increase
when it doesn't and they are going around doing some truly cringe worthy stuff
to tray and scuttle the 2MB part of it.

[0]
[https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/6uw5kf/why_does_core_r...](https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/6uw5kf/why_does_core_refuse_to_increase_block_size_and/dlvy1ej/)

~~~
RustyRussell
> The Core developers did agree to a block size increase though in what is
> commonly referred to as the Hong Kong Agreement.

No, a couple of developers did. I think every core developer not in the room
went "wtf, no".

~~~
pmorici
At least 5 by my count and the CEO of your own company which employs still
more. If what you say is true then the HK agreement wasn't made in good faith.

