Original Title: "A Supplement to the History of Bitcoin Forks"

Author: Wang Yishi

Internet has memory

Recently, Bitcoin has repeatedly hit new highs, and Wall Street institutions have entered the market to hoard coins. Even Musk couldn't help but publicly call for buying, which has been recognized by mainstream media and financial institutions. Everyone has no doubts about the security of the Bitcoin system.

However, many people may not imagine that just three years ago, Bitcoin faced its biggest crisis since its inception - it was almost taken over by the BCH group, and even the name "Bitcoin" was almost lost.

Bitcoin forks are old news from the previous bull market. I didn't want to say much about it, but recently there have been some bored people who smear and slander CoinEx. We don't speak, and some uninformed friends really think that CoinEx is a heinous villain and has become synonymous with the antagonist. Let's just briefly talk about what CoinEx did to protect the Bitcoin network back then.

These things have already passed many years, and they have not been mentioned publicly in these years. There is no desire for fame or fortune, only to let everyone know the truth, to distinguish between true and false, and also to have more topics for discussion during leisure time.

BCH Fork Party Why Hostile to CoinEx?

Many people don't think the "Bitcoin fork" was a big deal back then, after all, this phenomenon is now common in the cryptocurrency community, and a programmer can probably successfully fork a currency in just a few days.

However, in those years, forking was a very serious matter, involving various people and things, as well as many beliefs and interests. It was almost as intense as the "Buddhism and Taoism dispute", and had reached the point of life and death, with armies facing each other.

This is not an exaggeration, but a fact.

Many good friends and partners in reality have become enemies and refuse to communicate with each other because of the Bitcoin fork.

Many people cannot understand why the BCH fork group hates Bitcoin supporters and Binance so much. They spread rumors every day and sometimes spend a lot of time collecting various materials to make their rumors look logical. They deceive many people and make them feel satisfied with the "detailed information".

The reason is that Bibox cut off the financial path of the BCH fork group.

As the saying goes, "cutting off someone's financial path is like killing their parents." During the process of disintegrating the BCH factional action, Bibox did a lot of work, even guarding Bitcoin for two weeks during a critical period, successfully thwarting the conspiracy of BCH (previously known as BCC) to seize power.

It has to be said that the BCH group is truly a combination of knowledge and action. They have faith and truly believe that BCH will definitely succeed and be able to defeat Bitcoin. Therefore, they have basically exchanged all their Bitcoin for BCH. If they succeed in seizing power, the returns will be unimaginably rich.

In the end, all of this was destroyed by Bibox at a critical moment. Do you think they regret it?

The Grudge between Bitmain and Bitmain

There are many articles about Bitcoin forks, and I won't go into too much detail here. Interested friends can read the article "The Story of Bitcoin Forks" on Hupu or search for other articles to learn more.

Here we mainly talk about the role played by Bibox in the entire process of the fork war and the losses suffered as a result.

Many friends may have seen the news in 2018 that Bitmain sued CoinEx mining company over patents, with defendants including Shenzhen Bit Micro (SM Miner) and XinTec Energy Co., Ltd. (mining farm).

Many people were actually quite shocked when they saw this news, because the relationship between Bibox Starry Sky and Bitmain's Wu Jihan has always been very good, and they often have dinner together privately.

Why did they suddenly go to court? What happened exactly?

In that lawsuit, the patent involved is called "串联供电技术" in Chinese.

Speaking of cascading power supply technology, we have to mention a tech geek - Vasily.

Vasily was an engineer at Bitfury, a Russian bitcoin mining company, in his early years. After leaving Bitfury, in 2014, Vasily was lured to China by a Russian named Yuri, who claimed to have connections with Chinese KaoCat and could obtain their chips for mining machines, promising great wealth.

At that time, Kao Mao Company had just announced that they would no longer produce their own mining machines, but instead transform into a chip provider. They welcome everyone to purchase chips.

Yuri is a typical businessman. Due to the immaturity of the latest chip mining machine scheme for Kao Mao at that time, after several unsuccessful attempts to make a mining machine scheme, he turned to sell his "series power supply" technology to Kao Mao.

This technology has been around for a long time, but Vasily was inspired by it and was the first to apply it to mining rig motherboards.

Perhaps these tactics are very common in political struggles, and it is common practice to frame and undermine competitors in the dark. However, this is the Bitcoin community, which embodies the expectations and beliefs of countless people. The initial believers were a small group of idealists, and it is certainly not what everyone wants to see it become like this.

Furthermore, the main driving force behind BCH is Bitmain, with the majority of developers and community leaders being sponsored by Bitmain. BCH has become a corporate coin, overly centralized, and it is not appropriate to try to replace Bitcoin with it.

It's not that company coins are not good, for example, platform coins like BNB have done very well. But if this company coin wants to surpass Bitcoin and take the top spot, then its positioning may not be clear.

In short, many of the actions taken by the BCH group reveal their extreme unreliability. If the future of Bitcoin is entrusted to such a group of people, Bitcoin will eventually be played out, which is something that no one in the Bitcoin community wants to see.

So, at a critical moment, Bibox decided to intervene.

How does Bitmain protect the Bitcoin network?

It must be admitted that BCH has done a lot of work and preparation to win this fork battle. A long time ago, they began to hire some opinion leaders in the community to build momentum and constantly write articles. Some of these articles were quite profound and appeared to be well-founded with complete logic. (Later, Satoshi Nakamoto also used the same trick to deceive a large number of loyal fans.)

Aside from the public opinion battle, the BCH group has also painted many grand visions in terms of technology and future prospects, which seem very appealing. Due to the characteristics of large blocks, there are indeed many functions that Bitcoin cannot achieve, which has led many people to have high expectations for it.

If these are just routine operations, then there is one thing that must be amazing - the emergency difficulty adjustment mechanism (EDA) of BCH.

Because BCH uses the same algorithm as Bitcoin, logically speaking, in order for BCH to successfully fork and continue to produce blocks, it must have a huge amount of computing power support. This is because at the time of the fork, the difficulty of the Bitcoin network was already very high, and small computing power cannot produce blocks.

Therefore, they came up with an emergency difficulty adjustment mechanism: if the block time of the previous 6 blocks of the current block is greater than 12 hours, the difficulty will automatically decrease by 20%. If the MTP time of the current block and the MTP time of the 6th block before the current block differ by more than 12 hours, the difficulty will be emergency reduced by 20%.

In short, if no block is produced within a certain period of time, the difficulty will be automatically reduced by 20%. If no block is produced again, the difficulty will continue to be reduced by 20% until a block is produced. This ensures that even with very little computing power, blocks can still be produced.

This mechanism may seem like a defensive mechanism at first glance, purely for self-preservation and survival. However, don't be fooled by its appearance. In reality, it is an extremely aggressive mechanism, as the difficulty can only be lowered, not raised.

The designers of this mechanism are well-versed in human nature. They understand that miners are profit-driven and will vote with their feet wherever there is money to be made, directing their computing power accordingly.

When the difficulty of BCH decreases, miners with the same computing power can mine more coins. As long as the profit obtained is greater than that of Bitcoin, the miner's computing power will be attracted.

In this way, even if the price of BCH is lower than that of Bitcoin, as long as the difficulty is low enough, miners can earn more money and computing power will come over.

The computing power of BCH and Bitcoin are mutually exclusive. Mining BCH means that BTC cannot be mined. It is a zero-sum game. Once the computing power of Bitcoin is migrated to the BCH network and combined with a rise in coin prices, it is possible for BCH to successfully usurp Bitcoin's position in that environment.

To know, at that time many neutrals had expressed that supporting the coin with the most computing power on a network was the true Bitcoin.

It must be admitted that the design of the emergency difficulty adjustment mechanism is indeed very ingenious, so this mechanism is also known as the "hashrate attack" against Bitcoin.

BCH has been brewing for a long time, spending a lot of manpower and material resources to prepare for the fork. After the fork, they plan to launch a "hashrate attack" on Bitcoin immediately. After the fork is completed, they will withdraw their own computing power from the BCH network, causing the difficulty to drop significantly and the coin price to rise sharply. This will attract most of the miners' computing power to come over, and the computing power of the Bitcoin network will plummet, causing the Bitcoin network to be unable to operate due to congestion, ultimately securing the victory.

This plan is almost perfect.

This is simply a conspiracy against Bitcoin. Everyone knows what's going on, but there's no way to crack it because at the time, the BCH group controlled more than half of the Bitcoin computing power. As long as they attracted about 10% of the computing power, the Bitcoin network could potentially fail to operate.

At that time, in addition to the computing power and mining pools controlled by the BCH group, there were only three mining pools with relatively large market share, namely F2Pool, BTC.com (Bitcoin China Mining Pool), and ViaBTC Mining Pool.

The mining pool cannot support Bitcoin without the consent of the miners. The mining pool cannot control the computing power of the users, otherwise the miners will definitely vote with their feet and leave.

Therefore, the BCH group at that time thought they had the victory in their hands, and they probably had even prepared a celebration party.

However, what they never expected was that after the fork was completed, BCH produced several blocks. When they withdrew their own computing power from the BCH network and waited quietly for the difficulty to automatically decrease due to the lack of blocks, something unexpected happened - a mysterious computing power suddenly joined the BCH network and continued to mine blocks.

Due to continuous block explosions, the emergency difficulty adjustment mechanism of BCH cannot take effect, because the difficulty cannot be lowered as the block interval time is less than 12 hours.

And in order to prevent mysterious computing power from launching a 51% attack against the BCH network, they had to awkwardly switch their computing power back and continue mining.

These mysterious computing powers conceal Coinbase and addresses, leaving everyone confused about their origins for a while.

A sudden appearance of mysterious computing power disrupted the rhythm of the "computing power attack plan". Originally, after the difficulty was lowered, they had prepared a large amount of funds to cooperate with the market rally. However, the market rally plan was unable to continue due to the sudden disruption, causing a standstill.

Long Bitcoin, Short the world!

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