Thread by @TobiasRuck

I love how you can watch the history of literal wars ticking in while a node is syncing.

Every time I'm watching a node sync, I get to relive all the history of #Bitcoin, #BitcoinCash, #BSV and #eCash.

Lemme give you a glimpse.

Here's the Bitcoin Cash hard fork in August 2017. You can see how initially blocks are super spaced out.

Due to the higher difficulty, there were only a few benevolent miners.

Later, it's able to process many more blocks, as BCH had much less usage.

Bitcoin Cash was born.

Here's the "stresstest" the camp that much later became BSV did in October of the same year. It takes much longer to process blocks as they're filled up to the max.

Back then, the maximum block size was just 8 MB, so my node still only takes a few seconds for each block.

Almost a year later, Bitcoin Cash had already upgraded to 32 MB blocks for a few months, and again another "stresstest" was preformed, this time much heavier.

The selected block alone takes 40s to process!

I see this as the BSV performing their ritual before the big Hash War.

Then the Great Hash War of 2018, there's now a checkpoint; BSV nodes will get disconnected.

BSV threatened to reorg BCH, which is why BCH deployed more hash, and BCH blocks for a short while come in much quicker than normal (which would be 144/day).

BSV was born; but BCH won.

You can also see how blocks days after the fork again take very long to process.

This likely is a spam attack out of spite from the BSV side, and a pattern that will repeat two years later, where it gets really spicy.

But after the Great Hash War, BCH usage and price plummeted.

4 months after the war, the node processes blocks much faster. There were thousands of transactions per block before the BTC/BCH split, now there are only dozens.

A very depressing time for the community, including me

This was the absolute low point of the crypto winter (which started at the end of December 2017), with BCH trading as low as $60.

But, luckily Bitcoin is unstoppable tech.

In 2020, @Bitcoin_ABC announced they would add a 5% coinbase rule, activated by miner voting (BIP9).

To my knowledge, no miners voted for this change, despite it being proposed by miners initially.

At fork day nothing much happened, and people moved on.

In that hf, I added OP_REVERSEBYTES (which has a story of its own reviews.bitcoinabc.org/D5278 (in my defense, I was in a plane)).

Hashrate oscillation became a serious issue. The algorithm regulating block times was too simple, and miners were abusing it to get more coins for less hash, but by doing so increasing confirmation times by hours.

A new algorithm was proposed: ASERT, by @MarkLundeberg.

This change was embraced by the BCH community, as it promised to fix the oscillation.

Bitcoin ABC added "drift correction" on top of that and called it "Grasberg". It was very controversial in BCH circles (but also memes).

There even was a joint letter signed by a large number of developers of the BCH community. @cyprianous (to my knowledge) coined the term Bitshevik, it references the word "Bolshevik" which means "majority", ridiculing the"We are the majority, and therefore right" idea.

Bitcoin ABC compromised and switched to ASERT, but added the 8% coinbase infrastructure funding rule—very much to the disliking of the BCH community.

ABC still went ahead, and forked off as a minority chain.

In the beginning, hashrate was incredibly low.

You can see this below after the checkpoint: There's 45 blocks, but 2 days passed. Over 100 blocks behind!

Parts of the BCH community were upset that the ABC chain survived, and started a spam attack on that chain. You can see that by the long block processing times.

But then, block processing times become faster.
Did the attackers give up?

No. A new player has entered, and they started only mining empty blocks, ignoring all mempool txs.

They did include your tx, if you included the following message: "There was never a funding problem."

Even worse, after miners just mined tx excluded by the new miner, that miner started to orphan blocks from all the other miners, often quite deep into the chain.

But: ABC coordinated a 172 deep block reorg. This basically made the attacker burn $10k+

Knowing that trying to perform another orphan attack could just result another huge loss like that, the attacker gave up, and focused their attantion on just dumping coins.

Afterwards, Bitcoin ABC kept chugging along, albeit with very low usage, thus very fast block processing.

And that's it! The node is now synced, and processing incoming new blocks. The chain has been rebranded to eCash just 20 days ago, and while usage hasn't picked up yet, I'm still optimistic about it.

The energy I get from Team ABC is that they really want to do things properly.

Which can be slow and annoying, but it gives entrepreneurs a solid foundation to build on top of and experiment.

Thanks to @deadalnix for not giving up despite adversity, and to @jasonbcox0, @AntonyZegers, and all the others for continuing to build great software.