Ex-Google Engineer Accuses Bitmain of Meddling with Bitcoin Cash (BCH)

After documents revealed that Bitmain had stashed away around $550 million in Bitcoin Cash (BCH), possibly purchasing it after the network was created, the world went into detective mode, attempting to decipher exactly why a multi-billion-dollar company would have such an interest in the coin.

One of these people is Vijay Boyapati, the founder of Visan and a former Google engineer who helped build the Google News platform. In a Twitter message string, he accuses Bitmain of being behind the Segwit 2x Bitcoin fork and the pumping of Bitcoin Cash.

https://twitter.com/real_vijay/status/1028881826331340800?s=19

“The creation of BCash was based on the fear that if Bitcoin were to scale using second layer technologies such as the Lightning Network, Bitmain’s profits through mining fees might dwindle,” he said.

Boyapati then said that Jihan Wu, a co-founder of Bitmain, solved this issue by attempting to replace Bitcoin with Bitcoin Cash.

This could sound like a conspiracy theory were it not for two things that lend it credibility.

First off, Bitmain’s purchase of 842,000 BCH after a sale of BTC happened before the end of 2017. Although the exact timing is uncertain, it is highly likely the company made the purchase shortly after the network appeared.

Secondly, Boyapati sent out a tweet a few months ago, saying that if BCH were to drop below 0.1 BTC, its credibility would decline significantly. Jihan made a point of responding to this post, stating, “BTC community should focus on develop [sic] their own future, and don’t attack other communities that intentionally departed away from them in 2017.”

None of this can be deemed hard evidence in support of Boyapati’s theory. However, it is difficult to explain why Bitmain — a company that mostly sells mining equipment and has been mining Bitcoin for quite some time — would suddenly decide to empty more than half of its BTC reserve and exchange the coins for Bitcoin Cash. The only certainty is that Bitmain was betting on the success of BCH as a coin.