Vitalik vs. "Faketoshi" in the BCH Hard Fork Debate

Those who are following the bitcoin cash (BCH) community may have heard about the big debate that is going on right now regarding proposed changes to the BCH protocol. For those who haven’t, here’s some background below.

A group of developers working with a company associated with the self-proclaimed Satoshi Nakamoto, Australian computer scientist Craig Wright, has recently put forward a proposal to create a new full node client for Bitcoin Cash, dubbed Bitcoin SV, for “Satoshi’s Vision.”

The company, known as nChain, claims that the most popular BCH client in current use, the Bitcoin ABC, has introduced updates that are not wanted by the majority of miners, writing on their blog that they created Bitcoin SV “at the request of leading BCH mining enterprise CoinGeek and other miners.”

Essentially, much of the debate currently going on is centered around how BCH should be scaled, either with on-chain scaling technologies or second-layer scaling technologies such as the Lightning Network. nChain and other proponents of on-chain scaling claims that they are working to restore “the original Satoshi vision for bitcoin,” as is stated on nChain’s blog.

Craig Wright, on his end, is particularly opposed to an update of the protocol known as OP_CHECKDATASIGVERIFY, suggesting on Twitter that this may indeed be the single factor that will lead to a split of the network, writing “watch the axe fall.”

OP_CHECKDATASIGVERIFY is not happening.

If a certain ABC dev wants to push this, then we will just fund replacement Devs. Trust me. There are others.

Miners vote

Think we are not serious.

Watch the Axe fall.@CalvinAyre @yhaiyang

— Dr Craig S Wright (@ProfFaustus) August 9, 2018

Earlier this week, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin offered his take on Twitter, saying that the BCH community “should NOT compromise with Craig Wright” on the issue. He went on to suggest that the self-proclaimed bitcoin creator can go ahead and take the now-available BCC ticker code for his new coin, referring to the de-listed scam-token known as BitConnect Coin (BCC).

The BCH community should NOT compromise with Craig Wright to "avoid a split" and should embrace it as an opportunity to conclusively ostracize and reject him. Bitcoin Craig (BCC) can go take the ticker symbol from the now-defunct cryptocurrency to which it is a fitting successor.

— Vitalik Non-giver of Ether (@VitalikButerin) August 22, 2018

Others are even calling the proposed changes to the BCH protocol “dangerous,” claiming it leaves the network vulnerable to a 51% attack.

While Craig Wright, who is sometimes referred to as “faketoshi,” may have a contentious relationship with many members of the crypto community, things seem to have gotten personal between Buterin and Wright, with Buterin publicly calling Wright “a fraud.”