Bitcoin Cash is soaring as traders ready for another hard fork

pulse

April 20, 2018 3:44 PM

Bitcoin ABC is expected to fork on May 15.

A hard-fork of the currency is expected May 15, which will form Bitcoin ABC.

Bitcoin cash was up more than 10% Friday, continuing its outperformance of other major cryptocurrencies, as a competing hard fork approaches on May 15.

The fourth-largest cryptocurrency, which split from bitcoin in a similar hard fork in 2017, is now up more than 30% in the past week. Bitcoin, by comparison, is up 5% over that time.

Bitcoin ABC, an acronym for Adjustable Blocksize Cap, will increase bitcoin cash's block size to 32 MB, a fourfold increase from the original 8MB and well above bitcoin’s 1MB block size. It’s set to roll out on May 15, the developers have said.

The fork will also remove the Segwit protocol, short for segregated witness, the process by which the number of transactions in a block can be increased by moving certain signature data from transactions to the end of the block.

Bitcoin cash has been accused of misleading investors by piggy-backing off the bitcoin name. While the new cryptocurrency includes the history of the original bitcoin's transactions up until the split, since the fork, the two currencies are unrelated except for their shared history and name. Theoretically, anyone can create a fork from the original bitcoin source code.

Vocal bitcoin cash supporter Roger Ver, who owns bitcoin.com via an LLC registered at a Marriott resort on St. Kitts, and refers to the original bitcoin as "bitcoin core," has appeared on numerous internet talk shows, including the conspiracy-theory site InfoWars, to promote the coin.

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