Japan’s Internet Giant GMO Abandons Bitcoin Cash Mining

Japanese internet giant GMO has switched its entire mining capacity from Bitcoin Cash (BCH) to Bitcoin (BTC) as of July 2018.

GMO Mines 568 Bitcoin Blocks In July

A copy of the company’s monthly mining report uploaded to social media by cryptocurrency business investor Trace Meyer confirms that in July, GMO mined 568 Bitcoin blocks and 0 Bitcoin Cash blocks.

The result of a sliding trend throughout this year, the statistics contrast sharply with the company’s strategy as it appeared in January when it mined just 21 Bitcoin blocks but 213 Bitcoin Cash blocks.

Linking to tongue-in-cheek Bitcoin fork monitoring site fork.lol, Meyer struck a critical tone focusing on BCH, suggesting GMO had deliberately pivoted away from mining it due to various challenges the altcoin faces.

Among these are previous revelations that hackers could ostensibly launch a 51 percent attack on the BCH network for less than $40,000, potentially causing a network fork and de facto disabling transaction validation.

In addition, plans to hard fork Bitcoin Cash [coin_price coin=bitcoin-cash] deliberately later this year have also met with votes of no confidence from some cryptocurrency circles.

Why would GMO Internet switch all mining capacity to $BTC from $BCH? Only ~$37,867 for one hour 51% $BCH attack? Does DARI ratio account for block maturation times? Nov fork? What could possibly happen with this $9B testnet? Sure is fun to watch! 😂 💩 https://t.co/2P55FNxK23 pic.twitter.com/hZLx2hDUk6

— Trace Mayer (@TraceMayer) August 24, 2018

Away From Bitmain’s BCH Woes

GMO meanwhile began accepting preorders for its B2 device in May, making it the first manufacturer to issue hardware equipped with 7nm processing technology in a direct competition move with market incumbent Bitmain.

Headed by Bitcoin Cash proponent Jihan Wu, Bitmain itself is facing considerable pressure this month as its plans to go public via an IPO spark confusion.

Following poor Q2 sales of its own hardware, a pre-IPO investor deck declaration revealed Bitmain has huge stocks of BCH – stocks it cannot shift without crashing the market due to the illiquidity of the altcoin.

GMO has thus positioned itself at the opposite end of the spectrum.

At the time of the May rollout, CEO Masatoshi Kumagai was quoted as saying he “respects Bitmain” but “will top them” with its offering.

What do you think about GMO’s mining policy? Let us know in the comments below!

Images courtesy of Shutterstock, Twitter