All cryptocurrencies must keep growing and evolving. Without evolution, projects will eventually disappear into obscurity. Bitcoin Cash is set to undergo another hard fork, although some of the proposed changes are not to everyone’s liking. Until proper adoption of BCH occurs, none of the proposed changes are necessary or warranted, according to some experts.
Bitcoin Cash Changes Seem Unnecessary
One of the many reasons why Bitcoin Cash has become so successful is because it seemingly solved Bitcoin’s scaling problems. With a bigger block size and faster blocks, the network is firing on all cylinders. Assuming, that is, that people will use Bitcoin Cash to the same degree as they do Bitcoin, which is anything but the case at this stage.
Statistics provided by Blockchair show that there has not been a Bitcoin Cash network block larger than 8MB since the currency’s inception a year ago. Even during the initial hype surrounding this network, not enough transactions piled up to fill up network blocks. Despite the lack of full blocks, Bitcoin Cash has received a limit upgrade allowing for blocks up to 32MB in size.
Preparing for the future is one thing, but there is seemingly no reason to up this limit once again. A new proposal to hard fork Bitcoin Cash once again focuses on increasing the block size to 128MB. While that makes sense from a long-term perspective, it seems like implementing these changes is premature. A median block size of mere kilobytes – not megabytes – does not warrant such a major increase.
Additionally, there is a proposal to rework and reactivate some of Bitcoin Cash’s opcodes. While that is a positive development, it appears there is no demand for this change either. Moreover, such changes must be properly tested and audited prior to implementing them in the code base. Bitcoin Cash has a bit of a checkered history when it comes to properly testing potential major changes to its code base, unfortunately.
Although Bitcoin Cash is exploding, there appears to be one critical issue which has never been addressed. Similar to other cryptocurrencies, BCH miners can vote on how the network evolves as a whole. This voting process is not necessarily as transparent as it could or should be, which remains a topic of debate among cryptocurrency enthusiasts. Whether or not this is something that needs to change remains a subject of debate.
It is evident these proposed changes are in need of proper discussion. It seems highly unlikely any of these changes will be reverted prior to the next fork, although collecting valuable community feedback should never be overlooked. Increasing the block size to very high levels may not be warranted at this stage, but it remains to be seen how Bitcoin Cash will fare in terms of real-world adoption moving forward.
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