Tokyo Bitcoin Cash Meetup: We Won’t Take Sides in BCH Fork Split
December 1, 2018 by Jon Southurst
The Tokyo Bitcoin Cash Meetup group, an influential gathering within the international BCH community, has declared it will officially remain neutral in the ongoing “hash war” and fallout from the recent hard fork. Supporters of the BCH main chain (sometimes called “BCHABC”) and Bitcoin SV (BSV) remain welcome at the weekly meetup and its special events.
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Why Is the Tokyo Meetup Group’s View Important?
The Tokyo group’s voice is relevant in the debate as its members have been particularly active (and successful) in lobbying local businesses to support BCH payments. In 2017 the group formed a new meetup night for Bitcoin Cash supporters after the 2017 BTC/BCH split led to arguments in the long-running Bitcoin Meetup group over who was still a “true” Bitcoin supporter.
The Tokyo group’s organizers and founding members (Aaron Gutman, Juro Kurosawa, Akane Yokoo and Ken Shishido), posted a rationale on Medium, saying that BCH (in whatever form it took) still represented “peer-to-peer electronic cash” better than today’s BTC, which has become “nothing more than digital gold”.
That represents the main difference between the BTC/BCH divorce and the current chain split between “BCHABC” (currently the longest chain with most mining hashpower) and “BSV” (the “minority chain” supported by nChain, Dr. Craig Wright, CoinGeek and others), they said. For a Meetup group, retaining a civil social element was most important.
“Developers, miners, businesses, investors, and users are all people. This is the social aspect of Bitcoin that we find to be very important. This is what we meant when we said it was all about adoption. Adoption is social. No “perfect” technical system will succeed in the absence of good faith.”
“BCH & BSV both still share the same original goals of Bitcoin,” they wrote.
The Tokyo Bitcoin Cash Meetup group has members who favor each of the sides, or are still waiting to see what happens. While BSV may have “lost” the initial hash war after the fork, BSV still has a significant amount of mining support and a market value (at press time) of ~$1.57 billion USD (around $90 per coin).
Major pools mining on the BSV network include BMG Pool (27 percent), CoinGeek (25.7 percent) and SVPool (23 percent). According to Coin.dance, BSV is a tempting 54 percent more profitable to mine than BCH (1.6 percent). Since both (along with BTC itself) share the same mining algorithm, it’s easy for ASIC farms and other miners to switch between the three networks.
What Is the ‘Real Bitcoin’ and Why?
Recent articles on CoinGeek have questioned whether BSV should still use the name “Bitcoin Cash” at all, since all parties claim to be the true Bitcoin in some way or another. Bitcoin (BTC) has the longest chain and highest market cap, but has added segregated witness (SegWit) and retained a roughly 1-4 MB transaction size limit. Bitcoin Cash (BCH) has the longest Bitcoin Cash chain, but no SegWit and has now added Canonical Transaction Order (CTOR) and a number of OP_RETURN codes designed to add functionality. Bitcoin SV (BSV), for its part, has “locked” the protocol in what its supporters say is closest to the original “Satoshi Vision” from which BSV takes its name.
All parties hope that, in the future, they will be recognized simply as “Bitcoin” together with Bitcoin’s dominant market cap and the valuable BTC ticker symbol. Predictions and legitimacy claims vary depending on who is speaking.
Until the future decides, all groups represent a part of what’s called the “Bitcoin community”. The Tokyo group’s post concluded with:
“So, we stand together, as a meetup and as a social group, to reject the divisiveness imparted on our community. If we want digital cash to flourish, we have to seed it with a shared goal and commitment. The Tokyo Bitcoin Cash organizers will embrace the unity of the community. We invite the meetup members to join us in working together, seeking our shared goal. The chain has split, but we as a community still have a choice to remain united in pursuing peer to peer electronic cash for the world.”
The system is all that matters in the long term. People pass on. Companies die. The system must last 100+ years where the rest of us, all of the drama, meat space politics, won’t matter one bit. https://t.co/3Rmh81hsEA
— David Jerry (@digitsu) November 26, 2018
Is the Tokyo BCH Meetup Group making a wise move? What do you think of the current situation? Let us know in the comments.
Images via Coin.dance, Bitsonline, Jon Southurst
