Just minutes ago, the latest block reward reduction or “halving” of Bitcoin Cash (BCH) transpired. With this, the block reward provided to the miner of a BCH block was dropped from 12.5 coins to 6.25, a decline of 50%, hence “halving.”
Bitcoin Cash is now at block height 630,000, the halving has occurred! ???
The block reward has now fallen to 6.25 BCH, from 12.5 BCH
Blockhash = 00000000000000000169a496bfafa84ad8d3ef8039fc9e391a8eada67996b9c8https://t.co/U9hbK4peip
— BitMEX Research (@BitMEXResearch) April 8, 2020
The halving of the leading Bitcoin fork comes five weeks before the same event for BTC, which has fallen behind this split chain due to “initial problems with the BCH difficulty adjustment algorithm in 2017,” which resulted in a 5,000 block difference between the two networks’ block heights.
Despite “Bullishness” of Halving, Bitcoin Cash Flatlines
Although BTC’s halving is believed to be a decisively bullish event for its price, there seems to be a different story for Bitcoin Cash. Save for a drop that took place earlier today, BCH has barely deviated from $260-$270 range it has been trading in for the past two hours.
Bitcoin Cash’s failure to react to the event has led some to question if the cryptocurrency has an active userbase, or active traders, even. Noted industry commentator Hodlonaut fittingly summed up the sentiment when he explained that as the event saw “zero hype [and] zero attention,” the project “is dead,” to which he received some backlash from the BCH community.
A report from cryptocurrency data news site LongHash indicates that in the wake of its first official halving, BCH will “take a security hit.” The decline in block rewards, LongHash wrote, “should lead to a decline in security because the decreased value of the block reward lowers the incentive for miners to use their hashing power to secure the network.”
It seems this is already transpiring. Since the halving at block 630,000, which took place 37 minutes ago as of the time of this article’s writing, not a single Bitcoin Cash block has been mined, suggesting miners have turned off their machines in response to the drop in block rewards.
Importantly, though, a mining difficulty adjustment should soon take place that may revive the security and speed of the Bitcoin Cash network.
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