Is the revival of BCH's triple PoW narrative in two weeks a dream?

No one can predict that the market driven by mainstream financial institutions applying for Bitcoin spot ETF will ultimately benefit the most from the Bitcoin fork project - BCH (Bitcoin Cash).

Coingecko data shows that in the past week, BCH has led other cryptocurrencies with a 106.5% increase; in the past two weeks, BCH has risen from US$101 to US$325, a maximum increase of 221%, and is currently at US$294.

Interestingly, with the rise of BCH, several other forked currency projects have also achieved good gains: BCH forked project eCash (formerly known as BCHA) has a weekly increase of 58.2%, ranking second; ”) led another BCH fork project, Bitcoin SV (BSV), ranked fourth with a weekly gain of 35.2%. Since these tokens are POW mechanisms, the community shouted: Make Pow Great Again, and a group of old POW public chain tokens such as Litecoin (LTC), DASH and Ethereum Classic (ETC) generally rose by more than 10% today .

In addition to the increase in tokens, the BCH community is still circulating and discussing: Wu Jihan, the former king of BCH, is about to return to construction, and the community shouts that the next pressure level of BCH is $1,000 (the highest price in history is $1,650). Although there is no official news to verify the rumors in the market, the name Wu Jihan holds weight in the hearts of the BCH community—just like V God is to Ethereum.

For crypto newcomers who started investing after the DeFi outbreak, Wu Jihan, who has rarely spoken out in the past two years, seems to be an unfamiliar existence, but before 2021, he will be a proper top-notch. As one of the founders of Bitmain, the world's largest mining machine manufacturer, and a "miner" described by the media, Wu Jihan is a "godfather" figure in the currency circle. Every word and deed has an important impact on the entire market, just like today's Binance Founder CZ General.

BCH was once promoted by Wu Jihan to become the hottest forked currency in the market in 2017. However, with two hard forks, Wu Jihan was deeply involved in Bitmain’s “Gongdou” and had no skills to chase and really ignite it. In the DeFi wave of the next round of bull market, BCH will gradually fade out of the mainstream circle.

But BCH's once wonderful drama is not inferior to today's various industry stories and accidents.

(1) Wu Jihan forked Bitcoin and BCH was born

In 2017, fierce conflicts broke out in the Bitcoin community: one faction is a large block scheme represented by Bitcoin ABC, which advocates increasing the block size limit (1 MB to 8 MB) to increase the transaction speed of Bitcoin; the other faction is Bitcoin Core On behalf of the fundamentalists, he advocates not changing the Bitcoin network code, but using advanced technologies (such as Lightning Network) to solve the scalability problem.

In the end, with the support of Bitmain, which has a large amount of computing power, the first fork in the history of Bitcoin occurred, and Bitcoin Cash (BCH) was born. At its peak, BCH's market capitalization once squeezed into the top four - in December 2017, the BCH/BTC exchange rate reached an all-time high of 0.284 (now 0.01), and has never reached that level since then.

After BCH, hundreds of Bitcoin fork projects were also born in the market, but none of them died in a flash in the pan, and it was difficult to achieve the results of BCH. Wu Jihan, who took the lead in forking Bitcoin, has also been given various infamy, but this does not hinder his satisfaction with the "work" he created.

"Bitcoin Cash has become an important player in the digital currency market. It not only has its own unique features and advantages, but also can complement and coexist with other digital currencies." "Although the fork event of Bitcoin Cash has produced some Controversy and volatility have brought more opportunities and challenges to the entire digital currency market.”

Although in an interview in February 2018, Wu Jihan criticized part of the design and implementation of BCH, and believed that the project could not achieve the original goal, but he did not give up on BCH, which is also reflected in the following analysis. Get a glimpse at Fork Wars.

(2) BCH fork, Wu Jihan vs. CSW

One year after the birth of BCH, the Australian CSW (Craig Wright, nicknamed Satoshi Ao Ben), who claimed to be Satoshi Nakamoto, began to fork BCH, and Wu Jihan also experienced the pain caused by the fork.

In November 2018, BCH underwent an upgrade that introduced a new feature called Canonical Transaction Ordering (CTOR). However, this upgrade did not get the consensus of all members. The activist CSW proposed to directly adopt the super-large block of 128 M and "lock" the client in the version 0.1 of Satoshi Nakamoto. The Bitcoin ABC team objected. Wu and CSW quickly set off a protracted scolding war, and the two sides exchanged swear words.

Eventually, two incompatible versions were born, BCHABC (supported by Jihan Wu and Roger Ver et al.) and BCHSV (supported by CWS et al.). At the beginning of the fork, both parties claimed to be the orthodox BCH, and sought community support and market recognition; then, the competition between the two parties became more and more intense, including mining computing power competition, community voting, and various publicity attacks and defenses. In the end, Wu Jihan won. BCH ABC was renamed BCH again, and BCHSV was replaced by BSV.

Although Jihan Wu won, the price of BCH plummeted after the fork. In just one month, the price of BCH plummeted from $552 before the fork to $74, a drop of 83%. Investors in the BSV generated after the fork still suffered heavy losses.

(3) The ABC team backstabbed Wu Jihan, and BCH forked again

"Congratulations! After this new block, there will be no more troublemakers in the BCH community!" On November 16, 2018, Wu Jihan tweeted after defeating CSW. But at that time, he did not expect that BCH would undergo a fork again two years later.

At the heart of the fork is an upgrade known as the Infrastructure Funding Plan (IFP) that will mandate the delegation of 8% of each block reward (bitcoin cash earned by miners) to BCH provides support for software projects, such as Bitcoin ABC.

IFP compels all BCH miners to donate more profits to developers. This is what the miners do not want to see. Therefore, Freetrader, an early developer of BCH, chose to fork on its own portal, and has won the support of many miners, communities and users. favor. In the end, BCH hard forked two chains again: BCHN (Bitcoin Cash Node, without IFP restrictions) and BCHA (Bitcoin Cash ABC, with IFP restrictions).

With the fork coming again, a new round of "BCH" naming rights competition began again. It was thought that the ABC team, which had led the development of BCH for three years, would win, but in the end, BCHN, which had an advantage in public opinion and support, won and won the naming rights of BCH. BCHA also announced in August 2021 that it would change its name to eCash (XEC).

Here comes the question, the backstab of ABC, the gold medal team under Wu Jihan's command, caused the community to split, why didn't Wu Jihan stand up? The answer is that Wu Jihan is deeply involved in the bitcoin mainland battle at this time, and has no intention of managing BCH at all.

(4) Bitmain Gongdou

Beginning in 2019, the long-standing conflict between Jihan Wu and Ketuan Zhan, another founder of Bitmain, became public.

In October of that year, Jihan Wu issued an internal letter to employees, dismissing Ketuan Zhan from all positions in Bitmain; in November, Jihan Wu held a "special shareholders' meeting" in Beijing, which completely lost Ketuan Zhan's absolute control over the company.

Ketuan Zhan, who was kicked out of the company, had to file a lawsuit. He also wrote an open letter saying that he was stabbed in the back by his most trusted partner and brother who struggled together. Subsequently, Ketuan Zhan sued in many places, and in January 2020, the Haidian District People’s Government supported Ketuan Zhan, requesting the City Supervision Bureau to change Bitmain’s legal person to Ketuan Zhan. On May 8 of that year, a dramatic scene was staged. Ketuan Zhan received his business license at the Haidian District Government Service Center, but was snatched away by a group of unidentified men, causing public outcry.

After that, the two sides entered into negotiations, which lasted several months and finally reached an agreement in January 2021. Ketuan Zhan purchased nearly half of Bitmain’s shares held by Jihan Wu and a group of founding shareholders for US$600 million. Jihan Wu officially resigned from Bitmain; The mining farms in the United States and Norway were divested from Bitmain together, and Jihan Wu served as the chairman of BitDeer.

In the next two years, Wu Jihan's external voice began to decrease. After several splits and Wu Jihan's departure, BCH no longer paid much attention to Bitmain, and eventually became lonely. At the same time, in the process of Ethereum shifting to PoS according to the established route, the mainstream narrative and wind direction of the industry have also changed. Multiple PoS new public chain ecosystems have risen, DeFi has ignited a new bull market, and the POW narrative and the mining industry that once held the lifeline of the industry are on the rise. Under the heavy hammer of supervision, it gradually left the center of the stage. BCH developers also tried to embrace DeFi for a time, but it did not cause much splash.

However, for BCH at the moment, it seems to be a turning point for Liu Anhua. One is that the attractiveness of Bitcoin spot ETF is getting higher and higher, and it is endowed with a period to detonate the bull market; the Bitcoin ecology has a new story with the popularity of Ordinals; in addition, EDX Markets, which is supported by a leading traditional financial giant, has recently launched Four tokens traded including BCH — which is also not listed as a security by the SEC, while multiple PoS tokens are.

Is this a short-lived banker’s pull, or a narrative revival or even a return of value in the encryption industry? It's too early to tell.