Bitcoin cash and the ‘civil war’ that is disrupting digital currency

A group of Chinese cryptocurrency “miners” who use special software to solve math problems and get bitcoin in return, were longing for their own version of bitcoin. With a spin-off launched this week, they partially achieved their dream.

On Tuesday night, bitcoin cash, an alternative to blockchain technology-based bitcoin, made its debut. The split derived from a three-year “civil war” in the polarised bitcoin world over the technical direction in which the de-centralised cryptocurrency is going. Some see it as the inevitable outcome of irreconcilable conflicts between bitcoin developers, who maintain the bitcoin software, and “miners,” many of whom are based in China and use massive computing powers to generate the coin.

“You have this one side, which is saying that we need to keep bitcoin as fast, cheap, and efficient as possible … those are kind of people that want to be able to pay for coffee in bitcoin and they want bitcoin’s transaction speed to be better than [that of] credit cards,” said Thomas Glucksman, head of marketing at Gatecoin, a Hong Kong-based bitcoin exchange.

“But there is another camp, which is saying this is very early-stage technology. Let’s maintain the security of the bitcoin network first,” he said.

One of the biggest supporters of bitcoin cash is ViaBTC, a Shenzhen-based bitcoin startup founded in mid-2016 by Yang Haipo, who had worked as a programmer at tech giant Tencent on its cloud service and defunct Tencent Weibo, China’s answer to Twitter.