Bitcoin Cash’s unstable protocol driving away developers

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Bitcoin Cash’s (BCHABC) choice to continue pursuing protocol changes is already causing developers to split off. Bitcoin XT announced on May 7 they would no longer develop releases for BCHABC with the scheduled hard fork later this month.

While they support big blocks, and that was their original reason for moving to Bitcoin Cash, they feel the current strategy to hard fork the protocol at regular intervals. They wrote:

“Such a strategy allows for a majority implementation to effectively act as gatekeepers of determining the content of these scheduled forks and is anything but representative. The artificial deadlines are a centralizing and ultimately destabilizing force on development.”

Ultimately, they feel the patch BCHABC has taken is to give Bitcoin ABC an abundant amount of control over the decisions made for the entire network. They also feel the ABC team is using this advantage to lord their control over the community, rather than work with it. “With the governance strategy BCH had adopted, the advantage of multiple implementations is negligible,” they commented.

This type of dissent was a natural outcome of the path BCHABC has chosen. With an unstable protocol, regardless of the governance strategy the community decides on, there will inevitably be disagreements about the path of the token. They’ve chosen to continue tinkering with Bitcoin Cash, and now they are paying for it with an abandoned developer.

Looking at the opposite side of the November 2018 hard fork, Bitcoin SV (BSV)’s insistence on maintaining a stable protocol has paid off, with new businesses, enterprises, and developers all getting excited about the potential it holds. When they know their creations will last for years on a very stable platform, they can build with confidence.

More than that, BSV has committed to massive on-chain scaling, something BCHABC’s “big blocks” have yet to achieve in any meaningful sense. That gives enterprises the safety in knowing whatever they build can be built to grow, and won’t be constrained by artificial limits of small block sizes.

If you’d like to hear more about this scaling vision, come join the CoinGeek Toronto scaling conference. New developers will be showing off their applications, and the brightest minds of BSV will be discussing their plans for the future.