A Fight Is Breaking Out Over Bitcoin Cash

With bitcoin cash developers at each other throats, the year-old cryptocurrency might just split into two.

Created from a hard fork off the original bitcoin network after the scaling debate boiled over last year, bitcoin cash stakeholders seemed unified in their goal of boosting the cryptocurrency's block size parameter in the hopes of attracting more users and enabling more transactions.

A few cracks started to pop up in this united front over the past year, as bitcoin cash developers had one technical disagreement after another.

A new software release by leading bitcoin cash implementation, Bitcoin ABC, has been perceived by some as a subtle declaration of war within the developer community.

"Bitcoin SV is intended to provide a clear bitcoin cash implementation choice for miners who support bitcoin's original vision, over implementations that seek to make unnecessary changes to the original bitcoin protocol."

While infighting about the technical direction of a cryptocurrency is no out of the ordinary occurrence, this particular disagreement could have big repercussions for bitcoin cash.

Even Jihan Wu, the co-founder of mining hardware manufacturer Bitmain, who has been a proponent of bitcoin cash, joined many others on social media calling Wright "Fake Satoshi" since they don't believe his claims that he created bitcoin.

What's getting lost in the debate is that several notable bitcoin cash developers actually think both sides are acting out and would instead prefer to compromise.

Besides BitcoinABC and nChain, there are still other bitcoin cash implementations, including Bitcoin Classic and Bitcoin Unlimited, two software implementations that actually predate bitcoin cash.

Instead, he believes bitcoin cash proponents need to "Stick together," and to that goal, he's working on a code change that would allow Bitcoin Unlimited users to effectively vote on which set of changes they'd like to see activated.