BREAKING NEWS: Bitcoin Cash hard fork has officially happened

The Bitcoin Cash fork has just happened. The split started at 16:40 UTC and, six blocks later, we had two chains with ABC mining the first two blocks. Bitcoin SV has one block so far on their own chain.

It’s too early to say if this is a relevant lead. This is the first block mined under the new consensus rules and is the longest chain. Bitcoin unlimited nodes also synced with the ABC chain. The Bitcoin SV client did not synchronise with these blocks from ABC.

We start the war with SV at 71%-73% while ABC/Unlimited has a combined 16%-26% hash rate (estimated by coin.dance).

We are now set to embark on a hash war. Roger Ver kicked this off in social media, by tweeting: “The bitcoin.com pool now has more hash rate on it than the entire BCH network had earlier today”.

Nodes

Let’s talk about the three main implementations to watch. Below you will find a node count, what this implementation will do and what’s happening:

ABC: 974 Nodes – The implementation with the most community support.

SV: 192 Nodes – This is the competing implementation with the dominant hash rate.

Bitcoin Unlimited: 768 – This implementation should stay in consensus with both blockchains (SV and ABC).

Hashing power

We start the war with SV at 71%-73% while ABC/Unlimited has a combined 16%-26% hash rate (Estimated by coin.dance). The blocks diverged at 16:40 with the hard fork happening six blocks later. This was required for the upgrade to go live. (So transactions stay on the same stage)

The six blocks mined in that period contained over 500 transactions with over two million dollars transacted (or 4,500 BCH)

BCH/USD trading has been suspended at a number of exchanges including Bitfinex,

Fork markets/exchanges

SV: $88 – After a recent rally, SV has been heavily sold off on platforms including Bitmex where over one million BCH has been against the BTC pair.

ABC: $260 – Price has risen for ABC with the ratio with ABC now at 70% against 30%

BCH: $382 – Price has been falling in the last few hours, exchanges have halted withdrawals and some have halted trading on the markets.

BTC: $5585 – Bitcoin did dump all the way down to $6430 on Bitfinex; it has since bounced up over $150.