Bitcoin Cash

Bitcoin Cash Development is a Ghost Town, GitHub Data Reveals

Wilma Woo | Jul 16, 2018 | 20:00

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Bitcoin Cash continues to receive criticism of its network setup as bitPico’s “stress test” unearths what the group describes as possible “fake decentralization.”

Empty Blocks, No Activity

Data harvested from GitHub repositories for both Bitcoin (BTC) and Bitcoin Cash (BCH) has caused the latest in a series of stark contrasts of network performance to surface on social media in recent weeks.

Uploaded to Twitter on July 15, Bitcoin’s statistics imply orders of magnitude more active than that of Bitcoin Cash. More specifically, BCH GitHub activity has trailed off since April — becoming almost inactive compared to Bitcoin’s steady progress.

Difference between $BTC and #bcash #bcrash ???? Well, there you go…. pic.twitter.com/AZiUk8eMRc

— ⚡️Darth Maul⚡️ (@malimujo) July 15, 2018

Similar underperformance has been apparent in network usage.

As another commentator noted on Saturday, Bitcoin Cash blocks have suffered from low transaction volume — with one block over the weekend containing just 5 kilobytes. Ironically, the commentator added, Bitcoin was functioning at 2-megabyte blocks sooner than the coin that touted an increase in block size as necessary for Bitcoin’s survival.

Red Flags For Centralization

Bitcoin Cash’s curious status continues to cause controversy as bitPico — an anonymous group of developers and Bitcoin users — forges ahead with a coordinated attack to test the BCH network’s resilience. Designed to last months, the move came after a similar test on Bitcoin’s Lightning Network implementation — which appeared to satisfy bitPico, which itself previously championed the now-defunct SegWit2x scaling solution.

Over the past week, the attack has seen bitPico’s node banned, leading to renewed accusations of Bitcoin Cash’s centralized operations. “[Our] status monitoring node was centrally banned again as where a bunch of VPS’s. Switched to a new IP we are again connected,” a Twitter update July 11 read.

We are currently monitoring the IP addresses as they seem to be changing into separate network groups, possibly to fake decentralization.

As Bitcoinist previously reported, the aim of the stress test is to initiate multiple forks of the Bitcoin Cash chain after amassing thousands of ‘attack’ nodes.

Bitcoin Cash officials have not released formal comments on the plans, while bitPico has publicly stated it has little faith in the altcoin’s technical knowledge base. “We don’t think the [BitcoinCash] people understand how easy it is to bring their network down,” bitPico wrote last month.

What do you think about Bitcoin Cash’s network statistics? Let us know in the comments below! 

Images courtesy of Shutterstock, Twitter