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The opposition represented by nChain and Coingeek believed that the practice of modifying the ranking involved the change of the underlying protocol, CTOR was not tested and there was no evidence that CTOR was better than TTOR at the present stage, so the change of Bitcoin ABC was unnecessary. Supporters represented by Bitcoin ABC believe that changing the transaction order and modifying the underlying protocol is the only way to BCH’s development, and the change of CTOR is the result of discussion by all development groups, with the main purpose of preparing for the future sharding technology.
As a BCH supporter, I prefer the Bitcoin ABC route of modifying transaction ordering in preparation for sharding. It makes no sense to change a long-established roadmap just because it is untested, unsafe and has no obvious advantages, and CTOR is not untested and preparing for sharding is the right way to go.
First, CTOR has been planned for a long time, and the development team has provided ample time for testing and refinement.
The opposition does not support the modification of the underlying protocol, not only because it is concerned about security risks, but also because it believes that the modification of ABC is too frequent and frivolous without careful consideration. It is a subjective opinion because it is not the case, every change made by the ABC team was communicated to the other BCH teams, as was stated in an interview with the Lead Developer of Bitcoin ABC, otherwise several BCH clients would not have been compatible.
In a recent article titled Making Bitcoin Cash Predictable, ABC Lead developer Amaury Sechet said: “There’s a whole ecosystem operating on Bitcoin Cash, and that ecosystem needs to be able to test upgrades ahead of time, and that requires the development team to be prepared ahead of time. This is why Bitcoin ABC has been strictly adhering to the code freeze and schedule associated with the upgrade. This schedule is known in advance to all participants, providing time for debate and actual implementation, as well as for ecosystem testing and upgrades.”
The Bitcoin ABC development team provided a testing network and ample time for anyone willing to test, even though all participants knew in advance that the claim that “untested is unsafe” was unfounded. Although the code has been written, the actual modification and use won’t happen until November, so it’s still in the testing phase. Even if we do not support this change, we cannot maliciously speculate on a development team that has volunteered to update and maintain the BCH blockchain without any basis, let alone the contribution of this development team in the past.
Second, although CTOR has no obvious advantage at present, the importance of sharding technology has been fully demonstrated.
One of the main reasons CTOR was launched was to pave the way for Sharding. Bitcoin ABC developer Shammah Chancellor published an article in September about the connection between the two, titled “Sharding Bitcoin Cash,” Shammah Chancellor says: “Sharding systems may not match the subtree hashes that must be computed because the shards cannot pre-compute the subtree hashes without significant synchronization. To solve this problem, Mekle trees must be organized so that they can be divided into collections of subtree hashes that can then be evaluated by a single shard.”
Sharding technology increases the upper limit of transaction volume by changing the way of network authentication, and it is a scheme to expand the capacity on the chain. Sharding technology is unique from other methods to solve capacity expansion. It can be horizontally expanded so that the upper limit of network transaction volume can be increased with the expansion of mining network, rather than simply relying on capacity expansion. This particularity makes it a rational technology that is expected to promote the rapid adoption of blockchain technology.
At present, most well-functioning public chains have limited throughput problems, and traffic congestion at peak times often occurs. In order to solve this problem, blockchain must be scalable. If BCH can always be expanded according to Moore’s Law, sharding is not necessary. However, the speed of a single CPU will not be significantly faster, and relying on dedicated hardware to support expansion is not a long-term solution. Therefore, the protocol of BCH should be in the direction of horizontal expansion as far as possible, that is, the network processing capacity of BCH increases with the network expansion.
Sharding is a complex and difficult technology that takes time to design and implement, but it is undoubtedly an exciting technology that can scale without compromising decentralization. The direction taken by Bitcoin ABC’s developers is in line with the trend of blockchain technology, and the deployment of CTOR should be uncontroversial, as it is a small but essential part of the roadmap.