Hard Fork on the Way For Bitcoin Cash

In a couple of weeks time, the network will undergo a network upgrade through the hard fork. The upgrade will implement significant changes and improvements to the current protocols.

The BCH team’s strategy is to work on and release regular upgrades of the network, scheduling a hard fork every 6 months. Following the one on the 15th May, the BCH community will see another hard fork in November this year.  

With the upcoming hard fork, the team aims for better security, bigger volume and faster transactions. The new protocol of the BCH will increase the block size to 32 MB, a significant upgrade compared to the current 8MB at the moment.  This will show a direct effect on the network’s performance with higher liquidity rates and better transfer speed. Bigger block size would also mean cheaper transactions in much smaller time frames.

Furthermore, through the planned implementation of ‘Ethereum-like’ features in the token, the group strives for more “fairness” of the crypto market and greater contract relations. In the official announcement on bitcoinabc.org, developers advise all users to upgrade to Bitcoin ABC 0.17.1 or other compatible software. A source code and a testnet are provided on the site.

Users will be able to add more data on the blockchain, as the size of some of the block’s parameters will be increased from 40 bytes to 220 bytes. This will allow investors to track other assets which are not being validated by crypto-coin miners, also known as colored coins.

The change of the size will influence the time-stamping process of data - users will be able to hash documents and add them to the blockchain, which can be used as proof of the existence of the document.

The hard fork will reactivate some disabled smart contracts functions, which were stopped because of bugs in their protocols.

Other important changes of the software version are related to the op-codes (Bitcoin script operation codes). These include OP_CAT, OP_AND, OP_OR, OP_XOR, OP_DIV, OP_MOD, OP_SPLIT, OP_NUM2BIN, and OP_BIN2NUM.

Bitcoin Cash is one of the most successful tokens of the Bitcoin family, despite ongoing issues with some of its features. Since its launch, BCH gained a lot of popularity and rapidly increased its price (except the downfall it experienced in February 2018), starting at $380, 01, reaching over $1400 recently.

Focusing on price performance in more details, BCH was trading at $770 per token on the 18th April 2018. A week later it marked a nearly 100% increase, reaching $1550 on the 24th April. Financial analysts predict a price boom once the hard fork is released.