Fear and Uncertainty as Block Production in the Bitcoin Cash Network Ping Pongs Between 2 minutes and 1 hour

Five days after Bitcoin Cash halved, sparking an exodus of miners from the protocol, block production is heavily fluctuating.

Ping ponging between 2 minutes and an hour, it is uncertain times for network users as transaction—because of this heavy fluctuation, processing can be speedy or very slow, a discouragement.

Bitcoin Cash as an Alternative to the more certain Bitcoin

Bitcoin Cash describes itself as a speedy and scalable alternative to Bitcoin, the most secure and popular transaction platform. Because of ideological difference as a far as block size is concerned causing a hard fork in 2017.

The platform has since seen its fair of share criticism, enhancement, and success. However, the halving of April 8 is so far the greatest test of Bitcoin Cash as a competitor of Bitcoin, and its ideals as a scalable and speedy network.

As observed by one of the space’s vocal commentators, Jameson Loop, the CTO and co-founder of CasaHODL, he notes that the recent Bitcoin Cash halving hasn’t been kind to the network, adding that block production times now ping pongs between 2 minutes and an hour.

“The BCH halving has not been kind to its block production; it appears that its custom difficulty adjustment algorithm is being gamed more than ever. Now the network is ping ponging between producing 1 block an hour and producing 1 block every 2 minutes.”

Effects of Halving

By halving its miner rewards from 12 BCH to 6.25 BCH, or roughly $1,600 at spot rates, it becomes virtually hard for weak miners to make money and stay profitable.

The same gear used for mining BCH are used for Bitcoin and BSV mining. As such, miners can easily switch from one protocol to another because of the same consensus protocol in play.

Although there were expectations of a significant re-pricing, BCH prices rose before halving, rallying 17 percent. However, once at block 640,000, traders reacted different, as BCH temporarily dumped.

At the same time, there was a 109 minute block generation gap before the network reacted by adjusting its mining difficulty. Then, mining temporarily halted but later resumed but that couldn’t prevent a miner exodus as the network hash rate dropped from around 3 EH/s to 1.8 EH/s.

Community Reaction

The fluctuation of block generation times been interpreted differently. One commentator said miners are trying to maximize their returns from reduced revenue.

“This isn’t really “gaming”. It’s simply miners acting rationally to maximize return on energy invested. BCH is designed to produce a rapid succession of blocks followed by a crawling progress that over a 24 hr period averages 6/hr.”

While another says the Bitcoin Cash difficulty system has been rigged.

“Difficulty being gamed is something I have seen with small shit coin networks.”