From a Stalled Fork to a Network With Several Bumps in the Road
The minority chain is still not listed on a broad number of exchanges, and major market aggregators like Coingecko and Coinmarketcap do not list BTCB2 or XBT. For those who don’t know, Bitcoin BLAKE2b is a Bitcoin offshoot or fork that split away from the legacy chain in August. The network derived from BIP-110 proponents and Knots supporters who were dead set on restricting big chunks of non-monetary data on Bitcoin.
The support was simply not there, and the minority chain forked away at block height 961632, and the project immediately dealt with massive challenges. First, because it split away from $BTC, it adopted Bitcoin’s difficulty, and miners mined like eight blocks in its first 22 days, and it stalled. It was brought back to life by invoking a proof-of-work change by applying a BLAKE2b hash function while also adjusting the difficulty and shrinking the block size.
Then BTCB2 was listed on a couple of small and relatively unknown exchanges. This gave the new asset real-world value, and during the first week of September, the forked crypto token jumped to $1,799 per coin. Yet it has lost 84% of its value since then, but whatever the price, some of that newly gained monetary value attracted BLAKE2b miners. This led to developers, including Luke Dashjr, accusing some pools of growing too large and “attacking” the network.
Bitcoin BLAKE2b Devs Push a 45-Day Miner Lockup
Now it seems another fork is in the cards for this network. Five days ago, Dashjr opened Bitcoin Knots pull request #419, which aims to install a longer waiting period for miners so they have to wait longer to spend newly derived coins. $BTC uses 100 confirmations, but Bitcoin BLAKE2b devs want 45 days. Release-note language on the branch is pretty blunt. It accuses “apathetic BLAKE2b incumbents” of exploiting the chain for profit through “blind hashing instead of mining.”
At the time of writing, Bitcoin BLAKE2b’s native coin BTCB2, also called XBT on Neoxa Exchange, is changing hands for $270 to $315 per unit over the last few hours. The network’s chain tip sat near 973228, and the changes are expected to happen at block 973440. One of the few trading platforms that lists the forked asset, Neoxa, said on Sunday that the exchange will support the upcoming soft fork.
