It is no secret that the Bitcoin Cash hard fork, scheduled to take place on Thursday, November 15th, brought division among the crypto community. Now, those concerns have been made official, and there are now two different cryptocurrencies deriving from Bitcoin Cash: Bitcoin ABC and Bitcoin SV.

The official split occurred at precisely 18:02 UTC. On the one hand, we have one iteration called Bitcoin “Satoshi Vision,” or SV, which was clear in its opposition of the software upgrades introduced on Thursday by the other side of the “cassette,” Bitcoin ABC.

Friction between Bitcoin ABC and Bitcoin SV

Now, a much anticipated “hash war” has been in place, and both blockchains are mining blocks on their networks. And while Bitcoin SV has threatened to sabotage ABC in the past few days, that has not come to fruition as of now.

“An SV miner can even legally kill off a chain. That is the miner’s right. This is what bitcoin is,” said Craig Wright, the Chief Scientist behind nChain (the company leading Bitcoin SV) in a recent tweet.

While Bitcoin SV had its first block mined at a later moment than ABC (precisely at 18:29 UTC,) Bitcoin ABC had already created two new blocks and performing transactions moments after the Thursday hard fork went live. As of the moment of this writing, Bitcoin ABC was ahead of Bitcoin SV by 10 blocks, according to the always reliable data provided by the Coin Dance site.

After Mempool successfully achieved the first mined block on the Bitcoin SV blockchain, SVPool and Coingeek quickly followed. On the other hand, the Bitcoin.com, BTC.com, and Antpool mining pools have been in the middle of the action on Bitcoin ABC.

Mining Behavior so far

The majority of the blocks mined on the Bitcoin ABC blockchain have featured more than a thousand total transactions, but at nearly 21:00 UTC, there was a notorious drop in transaction count and the size of the blocks, according to Blockchair.

Whereas Bitcoin SV was controlling most of the Bitcoin Cash network a couple of hours prior to the hard fork, now the scenario has been reversed, with Bitcoin ABC, always according information provided by Coin Dance, is now ahead of its “rival” regarding hash power support. In fact, there was an announcement from mining pool Bitcoin.com saying that mining support was being redirected to mine Bitcoin ABC’s blocks in the temporary fashion.

Questions remain surrounding the future of both blockchains. BlockDozer observes that a significant increase in activity took place just minutes after the hard fork. As for the causes, many people are speculating about a spam attack to overload the other side’s network.

 What the Future May Hold

Since Wednesday, and after the software upgrades, Bitcoin Cash prices have been swinging wildly. The future of the value of both blockchain propositions will largely depend on hash power support and how users react to each software upgrade. Projecting behavior this early seems difficult, though.

The Poloniex exchange provides an accurate representation of each side’s price. Right now, the site has Bitcoin SV at $94 and Bitcoin ABC at $285.

By Andres Chavez

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