Bitcoin Cash (BCC) Forking Bitcoin on August 1st

25 Jul
2017

The fears of unintentional Bitcoin split due to the activation of SegWit may have been averted and chances of this happening may be low, but that does not stop people from actually doing intentional fork of Bitcoin (BTC). Bitcoin Cash (BCC) has been announced as an upcoming split from Bitcoin with a protocol upgrade to fix on-chain capacity, without changing the economic rules of the Bitcoin and without SegWit. Bitcoin Cash (BCC), apparently driven mostly by Asian miners and crypto community members, will fork on August 1st as per the announced plans for the project.

Bitcoin Cash (BCC) will be a fork of the Bitcoin blockchain 1:1, meaning that on August 1st you will get as many BCC coins as you have Bitcoins in your wallet. It is advised that you keep your Bitcoins in a personal wallet where you control the private key in order to be able to claim any Bitcoin Cash coins as keeping coins on an exchange will not work unless of course that exchange adds support for BCC. It is yet to be seen what the value of the new Bitcoin Cash coins will be and if it will get enough user traction. We could be looking to something like the Ethereum and Ethereum Classic split from last year, and this is what will most likely happen with Bitcoin still remaining strong.

Bitcoin Cash (BCC) will come with an immediate increase of the block size limit to 8MB from the current limit of 1MB that Bitcoin currently has. It should offer Replay and Wipeout Protection permitting the safe and peaceful coexistence of the two chains. Bitcoin Cash introduces a new transaction type as well as a bit different difficulty adjustment algorithm. After the fork happens miners will need to switch to different pools in order to be able to mine BCC coins and initially the hashrate on these will be pretty low, making it attractive for miners to temporary switch hashing power from Bitcoin mining to BCC. Then again it is also important what the price will be and which exchanges will jump on the train supporting the new fork.

– For more details about the upcoming Bitcoin Cash (BCC) fork on Bitcointalk…

Signatum (SIGT) Crypto Coin With New SkunkHash-Raptor Algorithm

24 Jul
2017

We were feeling a bit nostalgic for the old times where a new altcoin with a fresh algorithm and a new miner will launch and we would just go and mine it. Signatum (SIGT) has just offered what we needed to feel nostalgia over the old mining times no more. It is a new coin with no premine, ICO, dev fee or any of these and it comes with a new algorithm and thus new miners to support it. It is a POW/POS coin, though POS with 5% annual will start after block 98500 and POW mining will end at block 100000. The initial block reward is 2500 SIGT, down to half after block 3000 then halving again after block 60000. The total PoW coins that will be mined are 137,500,000 with block time of 2 minutes, after that POS is 5% annual on staked coins. There are no big promises being made for big and bright future with this one, though there is a lot of user interest already and a lot of miners are jumping on board, so who knows…

There is a CPU miner available, though with the release of AMD GPU miner (forked sgminer) and Nvidia GPU miner (forked ccminer) there is not much point mining with CPU anymore. SIGT is already being traded on Cryptopia with more exchanges probably following soon with the user interest apparently growing for this new altcoin, so you might want to check it out and give it a try mining if you have some spare GPU power available. Even Mining Rig Rentals has added support for selling and buying SkunkHash-Raptor hashrate.

Signatum Mining Pools:
– https://sigt.suprnova.cc/
– https://pool.mn/sigt/
– http://lpool.name/
– https://onepool.online/
– http://hashbag.cc
– http://yiimp.ccminer.org
– https://pool.coin-miners.info
– https://aikapool.com/sigt
– http://zpool.ca/

– You can check the SIGT announcement thread over at Bitcointalk for more details…

Where to Track SegWit (Segregated Witness) Adoption Progress

24 Jul
2017

SegWit (Segregated Witness) adoption for Bitcoin (BTC) is currently underway as a means to increase the capacity of the Bitcoin blockchain blocks by separating signatures from transactions thus reducing the size of transactions. The problem with too much transactions on the limited 1MB block size has gotten serious enough for users to want a solution that would make Bitcoin transactions faster and with lower fees. SegWit is currently getting traction as a solution to the problem as opposed to just increasing the block size from the current limit of 1MB. Aside from increasing the capacity of transactions in the 1MB blocks SegWit also allows for improved security (improving security was the original goal).

There are still some issues with reaching a consensus if SegWit is the best solution to the further scaling of Bitcoin, but the problem has gotten serious enough that a solution, even if temporary solving the capacity problem is needed. The Bitcoin community is apparently reaching a conclusion that SegWith, although may not be perfect, might be the solution that we need badly and support is growing. With the recent fears of a possible Bitcoin split into different crypto currencies after a fork of the network we might very soon reach to a point where SegWit will have enough support to be locked in and then activated. SegWit is set to activate if at least 95 percent of the Bitcoin network hash power signals support for it, so miners and more specifically large mining pools have a big role here.

The recent activation of BIP 91 (Bitcoin Improvement Proposal 91) has reassured users that a chain split for Bitcoin is not going to be very likely, but then again nothing is 100% sure yet. BIP 91 was just signaling the intention of miners to support SegWit activation and not 100% guarantee they will in fact do it. Still was met with a lot of optimism and we are moving along the path of activating SegWit and avoiding a possible split of Bitcoin.

– You can track the current level of SegWit support on Coin Dance here…

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