Whattup n00bs!

We have noticed LOTS of confusion around what the heck the difference is between BCH ABC (Team Ver and Bitmain) and BCH SV (Craig Wright and CoinGeek Bros).

To be honest, it is quite technical, which may be why there aren't that many concrete explanations...we’ll do our best to get you up to speed because you deserve to be in the know!

BCH-ABC and BCH-SV

Wtf is this shit?

Great question!

First off - let’s understand what ABC and SV stand for.

ABC stands for adjustable blocksize cap and SV stands for Satoshi’s vision (lol...the irony).

There are some updates to Bitcoin Cash which caused a major disagreement between Fauxtoshi and Ver/Jihan. Basically, SV is going primarily with the original Bitcoin codebase - with a 128MB block size and restoring 4 original opcodes (OP_MUL, OP_LSHIFT, OP_RSHIFT, OP_INVERT)...this gets a bit technical, but they were originally disabled due to a security exploit that was discovered. An opcode or operation code is basically an instruction that specifies a function to be performed and can be used in low-level protocols like Bitcoin that aren’t Turing complete.

BUT for practicality's sake, just know that SV is going with the OG Bitcoin codebase and wants large blocks from the start - and that’s it.

BCH ABC, which has more acceptance by the community and hash power, is also staying mostly true to the original Bitcoin vision, with a focus on transacting all on-chain, but with two key differences. They plan to implement CTOR (Canonical Transaction Ordering) and OP_CHECKDATASIG.

If you are interested in how block propagation works and how transactions are ordered in a block, then you can go read about it and ask us questions, but basically there are different schools of thought around how to order transactions and what to look for when ordering them. BCH currently implements Topological Transaction Ordering (TTOR) which requires that parent blocks be ordered before child transactions. With CTOR, transactions in a block are ordered differently and many believe that this helps with technical scaling. This method helps to remove a lot of complexity around “block template creation time”...which really is block propagation...which really is to help the new block get accepted by all the nodes faster. THUS SCALING FASTER.

And OP_CHECKDATASIG is just an operation that people think will help with Bitcoin scripting applications and ultimately introduce the use of smart contracts to the network.

To be honest, many agree that a change to how transactions are ordered is not a big deal...CTOR seems safe is the overall consensus and OP_CHECKDATASIG has not received much pushback from the community.

Anyways, there you have it…...SV is aiming for sound money and on-chain scaling and ABC is aiming for the same thing, with some added improvements as they see it.

We admit the differences are quite technical, but hope this helps create a base for your understanding.

All in all….let’s see what happens. What we don’t like is that Craig Wright has been quite malicious in his interviews and wants to “bleed” ABC of their money. We hope they let the COMMUNITY decide which chain to fork. If they start mining empty blocks and sending shit transaction to make one chain slow or try to do a 51% attack it just defeats the purpose of consensus.

Hope you learned some shit - and be sure to follow us on Twitter!

Chat soon!

- Mike and Aaron