Dr. Craig S Wright Versus The Bitcoin ABC – The Battle Lines Have Been Drawn

One week after celebrating its first anniversary, Bitcoin Cash became subjected to a fork of its own, as Bitcoin ABC laid the groundwork for another schism. On August 8, the planned changes to the network’s consensus protocols were published.

These changes, and Bitcoin ABC authoritarianism was left unappreciated by one of the most prominent figures in the BCH community, Dr. Craig S Wright. This proved to be footage news, because as chief scientist for nChain, the self-proclaimed “global leader in research and development of blockchain technologies,” Wright’s opinions carry weight with many bitcoin cash enthusiasts despite (or perhaps because of) his assertions that he is Satoshi Nakatomo.

So, the nChain merely went in and announced on August 16 of their own full node, Bitcoin SV (for Satoshi’s version) which coincides with Bitcoin ABC in many ways, the most crucial of which is the block size. Bitcoin SV wants the maximum block size to be set at 128MB. Bitcoin ABC, meanwhile, sees the current 32 MB as a more reasonable limit for now.

Now, the two parties have been locking horns constantly with Dr. Wright. He constantly engaged in sarcastic commentary and feisty critique onto Bitcoin ABC, its plans for BCH and its prominent supporters such as Roger Ver, Jihan Wu, among others. He is adamant that blocksize scaling is the only solution for Bitcoin Cash.

In a sly dig at Roger Ver, he said via Twitter:

Professor Faustus, clearly envisages for the future of Bitcoin Cash, but the problem is that the current blocks just aren’t as capable enough. For BCH, it is as of now, like a small town with no real population. Wright wants to build a 16-lane freeway there, in anticipation of millions who might one day move there.

If a pool cannot mine a minor 32mb block (that a 56k modem could handle) and tries to hobble scaling to subsidise their failure, they deserve to be bankrupt.

This is capitalism. Scaling is happening in #BCH

Miners will just move pools, life goes on. pic.twitter.com/MY51GksjxI

— Dr Craig S Wright (@ProfFaustus) August 28, 2018

He sees no room for anybody who thinks otherwise.

You want small blocks, you have BTC.#BCH IS Scaling. If you don’t like that, leave

— Dr Craig S Wright (@ProfFaustus) August 30, 2018

Bitcoin ABC supporters submit this massive increase as “unnecessary and dangerous” and feel that it will only hurt the ecosystem.

My thoughts on the proposed changes to Bitcoin Cash

1. 128 MB blocks — right now absolutely unnecessary and dangerous. The median block size over the last month is just 37 kB! There are still no blocks larger than 8 MB despite the limit is 32 MB now (see https://t.co/h0UTLUGR7y)

— Nikita Zhavoronkov (@nikzh) August 21, 2018

While Dr. Wright feels that they’re not even worth talking to, which makes us wonder what would have happened in Bangkok where officials from both parties met yesterday to discuss the future of Bitcoin Cash.

ABC use lies and FUD in an attempt to say bitcoin is broken and only they can save it.

Not worth even talking with them.

Block headers are simple to check. The so called attack scenarios are reminiscent of Core

— Dr Craig S Wright (@ProfFaustus) August 30, 2018

The answer is simple.

You run ABC in November, you are incompatible and you learn how bitcoin was designed from the whitepaper.

Basically, you go bankrupt.

Bitcoin is competition

We have no problem orphaning your node, we earn more.

— Dr Craig S Wright (@ProfFaustus) August 30, 2018

In response, there has been backlash from anti-Professor Faustus proponents as well. Such as the Ethereum pioneer Vitalik Buterin, who calls for this deadlock as an excellent opportunity to shut Dr. Craig Wright down once and for all, without making any compromise.

The BCH community should NOT compromise with Craig Wright to “avoid a split” and should embrace it as an opportunity to conclusively ostracize and reject him. Bitcoin Craig (BCC) can go take the ticker symbol from the now-defunct cryptocurrency to which it is a fitting successor.

— Vitalik Non-giver of Ether (@VitalikButerin) August 22, 2018

But Professor Wright remains bullish and claims it is the “world of capitalism” and anybody who doesn’t carry the same vision should be left behind.

Bitcoin SV, spearheaded by Dr. Wright himself, plans to release their Bitcoin SV codebase for miners and pool operators in the first week of September in a first attempt to carry out their own fork out of BCH.