It’s been more than half a month since the Bitcoin Cash development team announced that bitcoin Cash would have a hard fork on May 15. For more than half a month, the Bitcoin Cash community has been excited about the upcoming hard fork and preparing for it to go smoothly.
Thanks to a lot of hype from the Bitcoin cash community, everyone should have some idea of the upcoming hard fork. The first is the fork time: May 15, 2018, around 12:00 UTC, followed by the major changes: increasing the bitcoin Cash block size to 32MB, reactivating to add some OP-codes, and increasing the OP_RETURN data carrier size to 220 bytes. We’ve already talked about the benefits of this change. Today we’re taking a look at what the community is doing to prepare for the upcoming hard fork.
First up is the Bitcoin Cash development team. Technology is at the heart of cryptocurrency, and an effective development team will bring more good experiences. While bitcoin Cash’s hard fork is still about three weeks away, teams are already working on new code for the fork. The Bitcoin ABC team was the first to release the new 0.17.0 release, followed by the Bitcoin Unlimited team with their latest 1.3.0.0 release, Teams like Bitprim, Parity, and Bitcoin XT have all made the necessary code changes on Github to prepare for the upcoming fork.
The second is the node runner. According to the node data of Bitcoin Cash, there are 1762 Bitcoin Cash nodes distributed in 42 countries, among which 1102 are running Bitcoin ABC code, accounting for 62.8% of the total nodes, and 617 are running Bitcoin Unlimited code. Accounted for 35.1% of the total nodes. In response to the hard fork, 59.3% of nodes running Bitcoin ABC code have been upgraded to the latest 0.17.0 version, while 5.8% of nodes running Bitcoin Unlimited code have been updated to the latest 1.3.0.0 version. Statistically speaking, the number of nodes currently updated to the new version is not very good. However, the hard fork is still more than half a month away, and there should be more nodes added to support new Bitcoin cash during that time.
Finally, bitcoin cash supporters. Bitcoin Cash supporters are also pitching in to get more nodes involved in the hard fork upgrade. Some supporters took to Twitter to urge owners of the nodes to update on the bitcoin Cash website. Of course, in addition, there are mail and other channels for notification. We believe that with the efforts of the community members, the node owners will soon answer their call and complete the upgrade in order to bring better user experience and newer functions to the users.
In addition to this support, the Bitcoin Cash community has also launched a simple tool mainly for newly added Op-Codes. Developers can use this tool to understand the functionality of these opcodes, and can search for script examples of these opcodes. While these opcodes will not be added until after the Bitcoin Cash hard fork, the presence of the tool will make it easier for developers to build more applications on the Bitcoin Cash network in the future. With this support, there will be many apps launched after the Bitcoin Cash hard fork.
All in all, the Bitcoin Cash community is a community of unity of purpose. To make Bitcoin Cash better, community members are doing everything they can to keep it moving forward. With concerted efforts, Bitcoin Cash will gain more and more support to achieve its goals.