BCH gears up for November hard fork to resolve mining difficulty

Bitcoin ABC, the full node implementation of the Bitcoin (BCH) protocol, has just released an update that will correct problems associated with the cryptocurrency’s Difficulty Adjustment Algorithm (DAA).

Even though BCH is the true Bitcoin as intended by the original Satoshi white paper, it is still a minority chain and it comes with challenges. Since it forked last August 1, the BCH network has been experiencing wild fluctuations in hash rate as miners jump from the BTC chain to the BCH chain and vice versa. This issue is caused by the Emergency Difficulty Adjustment (EDA) algorithm, which has been implemented into BCH as a survival mechanism “by adjusting difficulty downward if it has only a small proportion of the hash rate.”

To address this issue, Bitcoin ABC has proposed a hard fork to update the DAA. On Wednesday, Bitcoin ABC published version 0.16.0, which contains the updated DAA based on the D601 algorithm developed by Bitcoin ABC lead developer Amaury Séchet.

“This is a change to the Bitcoin Cash consensus rules, but the change does not activate until November 13th. This is a hard fork, so exchanges, wallets, and other software need to upgrade before November 13th,” Bitcoin ABC said in a statement. The development team said they “have been in communication with Bitcoin Cash miners and they are expecting this upgrade.”