While the legacy chain’s long-anticipated SegWit2x hard fork was ditched at the last minute, a less politically charged hard fork pushed through smoothly with no issues—in an alternate blockchain universe. Yesterday, Bitcoin Cash (BCH) successfully implemented a hard fork upgrade that would hopefully solve the erratic hashrate supplied by fickle miners.
Throughout the few months since Bitcoin Cash (BCH) came into existence, it has been implementing the Emergency Difficulty Adjustment (EDA), a mechanism allowing it to quickly adjust the mining difficulty in order to attract miners into the pool. While the BCH blockchain needed EDA to survive in its early stages, it also caused its transaction processing times to fluctuate wildly as miners switched back and forth between BTC and BCH, depending on which chain is easier and more profitable to mine at any given moment.
This caused the hashrate to fluctuate wildly and the instability subsequently caused erratic processing times, ultimately hindering BCH from fulfilling the promise of becoming a reliable and stable payment system—the peer-to-peer electronic cash as envisioned by the Satoshi white paper. Yesterday’s hard fork is an upgrade to a new difficulty adjustment algorithm (DAA) that would enable the creation of blocks at roughly 600 seconds (10 minutes), and is based on the proposal from Bitcoin ABC lead developer Amaury Sechet.
The benefits of the new DAA are as follows: Image from Bitcoin ABC As of last checking, majority of the nodes on the Bitcoin Cash network have upgraded to the new software, which means a split is unlikely. Advocates of big blocks have migrated to BCH since SegWit2x was scrapped; Bitcoin Classic recently endorsed Bitcoin Cash as they closed down, saying they are no longer needed as BCH is already achieving what they set out to do.
https://coingeek.com/bitcoin-cash-hard-fork-goes-smoothly/
