Bitcoin Cash [BCH] hard fork: Cobra changes his tune, supports BCHSV after calling Cobra client “the real BCH”

The upcoming hard fork for Bitcoin Cash [BCH] has long been coming, with the community finding divides within themselves for features to be included. Primary suggestions include Bitcoin ABC, backed by Jihan Wu, the CEO of Bitmain, and Craig Wright, who claims to be Satoshi Nakamoto, realizing his vision of the Bitcoin protocol in his implementation.

However, around late August, an unlikely competitor joined the fray. Cobra, the anonymous handler of the bitcoin.org website, announced his support for Bitcoin Cash and announced that he would also release an implementation for the Bitcoin Cash blockchain. It was pitched as an implementation which included replay protection and prevention of transactions from being replayed across multiple chains in case of a chain split.

Along with the client, Cobra also promised a hashpower of 25% of the existing Bitcoin Cash hashpower of the time, with continued use of the “BCH” ticker symbol on a “major cryptocurrency trading platform”. This was set to provide a safe option for businesses and other companies that used BCH as payment. He stated during its launch:

“Bitcoin Cash as will be implemented by the Cobra Client is the real Bitcoin Cash. All other versions of Bitcoin Cash (ABC and nChain) are scams and go against community consensus by pushing controversial changes.”

However, Cobra seems to have now changed his tune, as he has now turned his support to the Craig Wright/Coingeek faction of the BCH community. For further clarity, Wright is pushing “Satoshi’s Vision” version of Bitcoin Cash and aims to lock in the original Bitcoin 0.1.0 protocol with a block size increase to 128MB from the existing 32MB. This is to improve the scalability of the blockchain. Cobra said in a tweet earlier today:

“In the upcoming Bitcoin Cash fork, I will be running and supporting Bitcoin SV. We need to stop adding too many new features all at once, and the protocol as implemented by Bitcoin SV makes the least changes. We must look past individuals and just focus purely at the technology.”

However, he also elaborated on his decision, stating that Bitmain controls and manipulates the Bitcoin Cash community. He called it a “Chinese monopoly”, and added:

“They are trying to become a more powerful version of Blockstream, and @deadalnix is just their puppet. They force changes through without consensus. Let’s free Bitcoin Cash from BITMAIN control and return it back to its users.”

However, he also mentioned that if SV became “corrupted”, another fork away was the solution. This comes at a time when Bitcoin Cash, as per ABC’s vision, is to implement Wormhole, a smart contracts platform backed by Bitmain. This, along with Canonical Transaction Ordering and OP_CHECKDATASIG, lays the groundwork for Bitcoin Cash becoming more scalable than it is today.

The hard fork is scheduled to take place at UNIX timestamp 1542300000, or November 15. A hard fork will result in a duplication of tokens, and it is left to see who will hold on to the ticker symbol and continue the longest chain by Nakamoto Consensus.