When bitcoin Cash (BCH) was first proposed last year today, no one knew whether the nascent blockchain asset had value or could survive. However, a year later, it continues to fight with Bitcoin for market leadership and discourse, and even naming rights.

Bitcoin Cash (BCH), which was pre-sold at $550, fell to $300 on its first day due to early negative expectations, and now stands at $763, up 154 percent in a year, making it the fourth most valuable digital currency in the world.

What are the twists and turns in the development of Bitcoin Cash (BCH), and how did it get to where it is today? Babbitt is going to take you through a review.

Historical Debate: Who is the Real Bitcoin? The evolution of Bitcoin Cash (BCH) has always been about “how to be the best currency”.

Start with the expansion fight

“Expansion debate” is a topic that has always accompanied the development of Bitcoin. There is consensus and disagreement on both sides of the dispute. They agreed that bitcoin’s original 1MB capacity limit meant that the network clogged, which slowed transaction confirmation, led to high fees, and ultimately hurt the user experience. Their disagreement lies in different solutions. One approach is to increase block capacity. The other is a technical modification known as isolated witness.

In 2017, bitcoin had its second big burst, with the price topping $6,000. The three-year-long expansion dispute then thoroughly entered the white-hot stage, the contradiction between the core development group and the supporters of the large block has reached the point of irreconcilable.

Against this backdrop, with centrist representative Barry Silbert on the road, supporters of the expansion debate came together and signed the New York Consensus, but the Core group refused to send a representative.

Subsequently, the New York Consensus plans to deploy isolated validation and remove the 1M block size limit in favor of 2M blocks. However, the temporary withdrawal of the original signatory made the New York Consensus in name only, and more big block supporters flocked to Bitcoin Cash (BCH).

Bitcoin strikes ahead of the fork

On July 22, 2017, Bitcoin Cash (BCH) was proposed, in order to copy the ledger ahead of bitcoin quarantine verification, only a week later, on August 1, Bitcoin Cash (BCH) opened a hard fork, the first block was dug at block height 478559, which also marked the birth of Bitcoin Cash (BCH).

The creation of Bitcoin Cash (BCH) ended the expansion debate, but it also opened up another battle: who is the real bitcoin?

Bitcoin Cash (BCH) and Bitcoin (BTC) are twins. Bitcoin Cash (BCH) was originally distributed as “candy” to bitcoin users, so the users of the original BCH were also Bitcoin users.

To put it bluntly, the battle between Bitcoin (BTC) and Bitcoin Cash (BCH) is not only a battle over large blocks, but also a battle over the direction of future development.

Bitcoin (BTC) has deployed witness isolation, is more scalable and is committed to building its own ecosystem. Bitcoin Cash (BCH) has removed the quarantine witness and directly expanded to a maximum block size of 8MB, focusing more on the “money” nature of Bitcoin. But they are not averse to lightning networks and the direction of deploying smart contracts. In the following time, they also put their dreams and ideas into practice with their own actions.

After 100 days, he finally survived

The road to Bitcoin Cash (BCH) has not been smooth. September and October have been two testing months for Bitcoin Cash (BCH). The external factor is China’s regulation of the digital currency industry, many of which have since disappeared because of regulation. The internal reason is the difficulty adjustment mechanism of computing power in the early stage of Bitcoin Cash (BCH), so that the development of Bitcoin Cash (BCH) has been seriously hindered.

November 13 was a red-letter day for bitcoin Cash (BCH) supporters, the day bitcoin cash actually survived.

DAA, initially used on the Bitcoin Cash (BCH) network, has ensured the currency’s boom, but it has also created wild swings in computing power. In the end, the community chose a DAA proposal from Bitcoin ABC lead developer Amaury Sechet to fix the DAA with a hard fork. The change in protocol consensus means that the block time remains stable at around 10 minutes.

Many BCH supporters believe that the competition between BCH and BTC begins in earnest at this moment.

Secondary hard bifurcation, from 8M to 32M

On May 15, 2018, Bitcoin Cash (BCH) performed its second hard fork, increasing the block size limit from 8M to 32M and restoring nine opcodes that were previously banned on Bitcoin. In addition, this move increases the OP_RETURN data carrier in the transaction data structure from 80 bytes to 220 bytes.

This hard fork does more than continue bitcoin Cash’s (BCH) goal of reducing congestion and fees by expanding. More importantly, it will unlock the power of BCH-based smart contracts and tokenization. Smart contracts are not necessarily Turing complete. The revival of some OP codes can add protocol extension interfaces and lay a foundation for future smart contracts.

Not long after the hard Fork upgrade, the Bitcoin Cash (BCH) development team is gearing up for the November 15, 2018 upgrade. On July 5, Bitcoin ABC, the development team behind Bitcoin Cash, released a timeline for the Bitcoin Cash upgrade, detailing what it plans to do next. Developers have until August 15th to complete the protocol changes for the next upgrade. It will finish testing and release the new version on October 15.

Stress tests are under way

Some in the Bitcoin Cash community have suggested a new stress test for BCH. The stress test focuses on the 32MB block cap after the bitcoin Cash hard fork upgrade.

To ensure that the stress test was valid and not treated as an attack, the test team set up a website where people could upload signatures and raw Tx in advance, and when the stress test agreed on a time point, all tx would be broadcast in a certain order. The website has been launched, and the test time is scheduled for 20:00 PM, September 1, 2018 Beijing time.

While the success of Bitcoin Cash (BCH) will take time to tell, its community of developers deserves credit for being efficient and innovative in many ways.

Launch smart contract scheme

On July 19, the BCH smart contract scheme, a project called Wormhole, was officially launched. The Wormhole Cash project, which began in May this year, is based on the Bitcoin Cash blockchain, enabling the BCH blockchain to implement basic functions such as the issuance, transfer and burning of tokens without changing existing BCH consensus rules.

Although Wormhole is still a concept for now, it is clearly targeted at Ethereum, which has issued more than 1,000 tokens. Ethereum already has a well-established coin issuing mechanism that doesn’t cost anything. Although the Wormhole protocol already has a specific coin issuing mode, it is still unknown how much market it can occupy in the future.

But the implications of smart contracts for BCH are enormous.

On the one hand, it will promote the popularity and use of BCH. This is mainly due to the base currency WHC of the Wormhole protocol, because if a Token is issued on a BCH, it will inevitably need to be exchanged for A WHC. The larger the number of tokens issued, the more BCH will be used.

On the other hand, it will accelerate THE development of BCH related applications. Hundreds of decentralized applications have sprung up on Ethereum with self-executing smart contracts, and it will be interesting to see if existing BCH applications will see new surprises when they meet smart contracts.

Two token offerings are coming

In addition, the BCH community has launched a new token scheme. One was the Cryptonized Cash (CC) protocol proposed by the developers of Cryptonize.it, and the other was by Jonald Fyookball, James Cramer, Unwriter, Mark B. Lundeberg, Simple Ledger Protocol (SLP) proposed by six developers Calin Culianu and Ryan X. Charles.

Cryptonized Cash is based on what’s known as dye currency technology. Dye coin technology has been on the Bitcoin network since 2013. Cryptonized Cash uses it in the Bitcoin Cash (BCH) network, which is 100% open source and immediately available without a license. Dye coins can represent vouchers, coupons, tokens, copycat coins or other assets.

As for the Simple Ledger Protocol (SLP), six developers of the Protocol have jointly published a paper entitled “Simple Ledger Protocol: A BCH-based Token System”, detailing how the scheme is implemented and how tokens are issued. Like the Wormhole protocol, this protocol does not change the BCH consensus and uses OP_Return to store metadata in transactions.

Integrate “graphene” technology

The launch of BCH tokenization solution Group, Tokeda and Wormhole really made nChain, the development team that supports BCH smart contract, very popular. As part of BCH’s development team, Bitcoin Unlimited (BU) is no less successful, and with the recent announcement of a “pre-consensus” mechanism, improved block propagation time is just around the corner.

In order to improve the time of block propagation, BU has announced the integration of graphene block propagation technology in its client. Graphene protocol is a new way to reduce the bandwidth for block propagation to all nodes using Bloom filter and reversible Bloom lookup table (IBLT). Graphene technology is said to be 10 times more efficient than Compact blocks and Xthin blocks.

It can be seen from this that the current BCH community has very heated discussions and intense competition, which is undoubtedly a good thing for the development of BCH.

Wen/Helen: contributions babbitt information (http://www.8btc.com/bitcoincash_1year)