War of words heats up as Calvin Ayre turns his fury on ‘premature’ exchanges

Firebrand Bitcoin Cash backer h war has slammed exchanges for being too hasty to capitalise on the confusion of his currency’s hard fork.

The Canadian entrepreneur, whose fledgling BCH sent shockwaves through an already volatile market last week, has turned on exchanges which chose to recognise rival ABC – which he branded “artificial” – as BCH and the SV chain as BSV.

“We advised exchanges it was best to wait until the contentious hard fork was resolved before resuming trading activity, and to begin running a Bitcoin SV node to be prepared in case SV emerged as the biggest chain,” said the 57-year-old.

“As things stand there are a range of approaches taken by exchanges – some have begun allowing trading of BCH-SV; some allowing deposits only, but no withdrawals, of BCH-SV… and some allow both deposits and withdrawals.”

Ayre took to Twitter last night to claim the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) would be leading an investigation into the activities of some of the parties involved in the fork.

As the hash war rumbles on, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to see a clear winner. Although the SV chain has the financial clout, those behind the ABC movement are keeping pace with the early favourite, much to the chagrin of people like Calvin Ayre and Dr Craig S Wright who persist in referring to Bitcoin Cash as “the real Bitcoin”.

“Some exchanges have made the premature decision to recognise ABC chain as BCH, and SV as BSV, and the confusion is, certainly, unfortunate,” continued Ayre.

“For example; many exchanges are still differentiating by using BCH-ABC and BCH-SV. Binance is calling the ABC token BAB, and SV as BSV.

“Fortunately, we are expecting reputable exchanges to wait and not reward hash market manipulation.”

According to BitMEX Research, the hash war is proving costly. In a tweet last night to their 31,200 followers, they revealed SV miners were suffering a negative gross margin of 441% and $2.2m gross losses, all with estimated leasing fees in excess of $11.8m.

It begs the question: how long can the SV camp keep it up? However, Calvin Ayre remains defiant, saying he anticipates ABC will cave in first.

“We still expect the artificial ABC branch of the chain to collapse leaving only the original Bitcoin branch which is called Bitcoin SV,” he says.

“Equally, in the US, we expect both the DoJ and SEC to be investigating the market manipulation and expect this to collapse what little support there is for this branch. The majority of the BCH business and application ecosystem is now following Bitcoin SV.

“Perhaps, most importantly, nobody will lose coins though, of course, this unnecessary diversion has affected value. For now.”

Meanwhile, Roger Ver has countered, claiming the ABC implementation has nudged ahead of SV while suggesting the likes of Ayre and Wright are ‘sore losers’ with allegations of cheating the markets.

“The ABC team has been leading since the opening bell because we had more hash rate than the SV team and it is quite ironic that an SV supporter is saying this,” he said.