Bitcoin Cash Price Plunges As Hard Fork Goes Live: What Happened?

Bitcoin Cash, a spin-off of Bitcoin, has split again into two as its community remained divided over the changes proposed to its protocol.

Bitcoin Cash has split (called a hard fork) into Bitcoin Cash ABC (BCH ABC) and Bitcoin Cash Node (BCHN) after a group of developers proposed to update the blockchain network. The proposal intended to require 8% of mined Bitcoin Cash to be redistributed to fund the development of the Bitcoin Cash blockchain.

This was opposed by another group, calling the proposal a "miner tax." They also worried that diminishing profits could dash the community's original intention of becoming decentralized, news outlet Decrypt reported.

The last block that both of the factions mined was block #66147, news outlet Coindesk reported. It appears that miners have supported BCHN, the blockchain that does not support the miner tax. According to Coin Dance, no one has yet mined blocks on the BCH ABC blockchain.

Since there is no major support for BCH ABC, it appears that BCHN will inherit the name "Bitcoin Cash (BCH)."

Bitcoin Cash (BCH) suffered an immediate price drop following the split, from $255 to $242.

Bitcoin Cash is a hard fork from the Bitcoin blockchain. Its proponents have proposed increasing the block size to allow Bitcoin to have more transactions per block. This, according to them, is more closer to Satoshi Nakamoto's original vision of Bitcoin as a peer-to-peer digital currency.

When it split from Bitcoin, a majority of miners supported the original blockchain, but there was still a sizable number that supported the forked chain. The fork took the name "Bitcoin Cash," while the other retained the original name, against the wishes of the Bitcoin Cash proponents.

In 2018, Bitcoin Cash hard forked again and the new chain was called "Bitcoin SV."