Op-Ed: Bitcoin Cash Hard Fork addresses bottlenecks around BlockSize limits and activates Smart-Contract script

This opinion article on the Bitcoin Cash fork of May 15 was written by Alejandro de la Torre, vice president of commercial operations of BTC.com, the main digital platform for cryptocurrency users, miners and to developers. Follow him on Twitter @bitentrepreneur.

It's another hard fork day! Today, Bitcoin Cash creates a new blockchain with 32 MB block size limits and added smart contract functionality. This is the third fork that the Bitcoin Cash community has suffered in less than a year, and declares its unqualified commitment to change everything needed to expand the trading capabilities of their blockchain. Bitcoin Cash strives to provide an inexpensive and fast way to exchange daily payments.
A ‘hard’ fork refers to software changes that require the creation of a new blockchain from a previous one, whereas ‘soft’ forks can impute software updates without the creation of a new blockchain. A hard fork therefore is only implemented when there needs to be changes made at the most fundamental level of the blockchain architecture: the consensus protocol layer.

Bitcoin Cash was born out of a hard fork with Bitcoin’s blockchain last summer. After much debate amongst various parties of the Bitcoin ecosystem over how to scale the Bitcoin network, a group of developers organized under the name ABC Bitcoin, wrote the code for a hard fork to create a new blockchain with 8MB block limits. On August 1st, this new code was implemented to copy the entire Bitcoin block history onto a new network to begin mining its own transactions separately, as a distinct currency and under different mining parameters. Bitcoin Cash promises to be a peer to peer cash system. This system should be popular in areas where the traditional financial system has been unable to reach the unbanked.

In the case of last summer's hard fork, not only has a new blockchain been created, but a new coin has been introduced to the market to represent the value traded on this new trading register. However, not all hard forks create new parts. For example, Bitcoin Cash began again last November to correct its algorithm by adjusting the difficulty of extraction because the network produced extremely fluctuating hash rates.

To patch the system, various teams of developers running different clients on the Bitcoin Cash blockchain agreed to set up a hard range where they all copied the old book on a new channel, with the updated software, and dropped the old chain. Although technically, the month of November was also a "hard" fork, it was obviously very different from the previous split in community generating not only a new blockchain, but also a new network, and a new coin.

However, it should not be underestimated that blockchain developers, including Bitcoin Cash, treat forcing with care, it is a delicate process with potentially serious financial consequences. Although many community members deal with fear outright, this is a key part of Bitcoin Cash's operation, so the Bitcoin Cash community is not afraid of bandages.

This time is closer to the hard fork of November, but slightly different. Today's fork does not create a new coin, or correct an existing problem, but innovates strictly in two ways. The first major change is the tripling of the block size limit from 8 to 32 MB which is a prospective adjustment to allow for a larger transaction throughput per block. I feel better that this block size growth is happening now, while the use of Bitcoin Cash still has ways to grow, rather than later, when the network is at full throttle.
This larger block size gives Bitcoin Cash some leeway, something that other blockchains have sought to address in other ways, eg. Lightning Network and proof of participation. This makes Bitcoin Cash a bit unique as it attempts to solve the problem of scaling the consensus protocol layer while retaining the Proof of Work model.

However, larger blocks will not increase the network in terms of usage. However, it offers the possibility of unprecedented growth. The growth in usage does not depend on the size of the block, but more on the community and businesses supporting Bitcoin Cash. Products, services and adoption by merchants are essential. After increasing the size of the blocks, Bitcoin Cash's next step is to add and reactivate old machine script operation codes, or more simply "op codes", which give developers tools to create smart contracts.

These machine codes, called "Satoshi op codes" by the Bitcoin Cash community, allow developers to create different types of metadata implementations. By having the ability to call these functions, developers can create "colored pieces" or representative tokens. These are tokens that can be labeled in a specific way to match bonds, stocks, precious metals, commodities, and any physical or virtual object.

It's hard to say what could come out of this new feature, but if we base our assumptions on what Etherhé was able to accomplish from its second layer implementations, then I think it will give Bitcoin Cash plenty of room. to create ideas to flourish. To this end, we will need to see what the Bitcoin Cash community developers are doing with these new features, and if the market decides to move into this new block size that has not been scaled yet.