Why Bitcoin Cash is not a spin-off

I saw a post recently comparing BCH to LTC, and thought I'd put this into a post of its own for the sake of visibility.

I think a lot of the "crypto investors" that hate on BCH do so because they don't understand what it means to be a "fork" of Bitcoin, and I suspect that more people than we would like to guess genuinely believe that it's just a Bitcoin rip-off (like LTC) only created by Roger rather than Charlie.

For anyone reading this who thinks that: it's a hard concept to explain since there's not really anything which is analogous, so in the end it comes down to just explaining Bitcoin... here goes:

What is Bitcoin

First off, Bitcoin is not a single thing. It's not the "coin" you have the keys to, or a piece of software. It's ultimately, a ledger which is agreed on by a network.

The Bitcoin network is made up of hundreds of thousands of individual participants who all agree on a particular set of rules for which transactions are valid and which are not, and all share a global ledger which has a history of every single transaction ever made. They also share a set of rules regarding how transactions can be added to the ledger, and which version of the ledger is valid.

Mining Bitcoin, is simply the act of recording transactions on the ledger, and if your block of transactions is deemed valid by the rest of the network you are rewarded for your honesty and work by receiving a transaction of new coins which you can spend as you wish.

The software

The participants in the network up until 2016 all ran the software which the original creator of the project released, although he had left the scene by that time (possibly committed suicide) so other people were in charge of the updates and changes.

Some of the people in charge of that code decided that they needed to remove the access of others so as to not allow changes they disagreed with, and so around this time the first alternative version was born, created by the devs who had been forced out of the original codebase.

This version was still fully compatible with the network, and still had the same history, but mining participants could change which software they were using to "vote" on which vision of Bitcoin they supported.

Because Bitcoin is a chain agreed by a network, if enough of the mining participants in the network switch over to the rules set out by the new software, that new ruleset becomes the governing ruleset of the Bitcoin network and the devs in charge of that software code base become the devs responsible for updates and changes to the overall rules.

This is one part of what's referred to as Nakamoto consensus, where the valid chain is decided by the mining participants, and the longest chain with the most work is "Bitcoin".

What is Bitcoin Cash

Bitcoin Cash is what happens when there is sufficient disagreement within the network as to which rules should be considered valid, and the network splits into two separate networks, each using different rules.

The beauty of Bitcoin Cash as compared to BTC, is twofold: First, that there are multiple different software versions which run the same set of rules on the same network as opposed to the single "reference client" of BTC.

This means that there needs to be a consensus between different development teams in addition to the Nakamoto consensus of the network in order for changes/upgrades to activate.

The second is that Bitcoin Cash does not "soft-fork".

Soft-forking, is ostensibly done to prevent a network split in the event of a contentious change (although this is often pitched as "backwards-compatibility"). This removes the need for miner involvement in the rollout of changes, because the changes are disguised in such a way as to be undetectable to software which does not agree to those rules - making it essentially a purely developer-led blockchain, where changes are implemented by developers and then simply become the rules as more users begin to use the new version of the software, regardless of miner support.

Why Bitcoin Cash is Bitcoin

While the original codebase for the software is in control of a selection of developers, and the Bitcoin Cash network is no longer using that software version, the Bitcoin philosophy of miners voting for changes through work is really only alive today on the Bitcoin Cash network.

That's why you hear people here saying that Bitcoin Cash is Bitcoin, and that's why it is not - in fact - a spin-off.

The hashrate and work majority is with the BTC network at present, but that network is not governed in the same way that Bitcoin was and Bitcoin Cash still is. BTC "consensus" changes are centrally controlled by a team of developers who can and have enforced changes on network participants, irrespective of the overall mining consensus or support and while the transactions on BTC may still be validated by proof of work, the rules by which that network operates are now based solely on the decisions made by gatekeepers of the code base of a single software application.

There is no "project leader", "reference client", or "core development team" of the Bitcoin Cash network. It is simply a continuation of the Bitcoin project only with multiple competing software applications now, instead of just the one.