Leading Bitcoin Cash Developer Says Future Fork Unlikely

On a panel session moderated by CoinDesk editor Pete Rizzo, Amaury Sechet, the lead developer behind Bitcoin ABC, the most widely used bitcoin cash software implementation, noted that the industry has already seen a slowdown in forks since 2017.

Over 50 percent of nodes running the bitcoin cash software, created in 2017 from a fork of bitcoin, now run Bitcoin ABC to connect to the network.

In this way, he put forth the argument that the value of the fork is derived from the strength of the disagreement that sparks the fork, leading a project down competing paths.

Further, he said he believes it's unlikely bitcoin cash will fork in the near future, arguing that participants in the project's open-source community remain aligned on overall objectives, if not specifics.

"I think it's unlikely bitcoin cash will fork into something else," he said.

Jack Liao, CEO of the Hong Kong-based LighteningASIC mining equipment firm, who initiated the Bitcoin Gold fork last year, shared similar views and said communities' internal conflicts appear to have been quiet compared to last year.

CoinDesk reported last year that Liao initiated the idea of creating Bitcoin Gold, a crypto asset that was forked off the bitcoin network in an effort to replace bitcoin mining via ASIC miners with GPU chips.

It came just months after the bitcoin cash fork, championed by mining pools and bitcoin mining giant Bitmain as a way to boost the block size of the bitcoin blockchain network for handling more transactions.

Commenting on such competition, Liao said much of the attacks among the bitcoin communities also derive from their marketing and public relation strategies, referring to bitcoin cash's self-branding as the true bitcoin.

Sechet said that it's true to some extent that forks compete with each other but reinstated that the goal of what bitcoin and bitcoin cash are trying to reach do vary.