This slide is purported to be from Bitmain’s IPO slide deck, and is generating a lot of interesting discussion and commentary: https://twitter.com/search?q=bitmain%20bch
It appears that Bitmain has been selling BTC and accumulating BCH, now holding >5% of BCH monetary supply, estimated at >11% of all active BCH addresses.
With a mega IPO looming, bigger than Facebook, what does it mean for a cryptocurrency to be backed by such a dominant player? How can a community maintain control of a project’s protocol and vision, when well-funded third parties can hire their own developers to exend the protocol? What if it were Zcash?
The consensus seems to be that bitmain may be made a big mistake in doing that
The other two are basically hypothetical but
Using Community developers may save them money which probably appeals to them (they do have a communist party), we’ll just have to wait and see
And if things were different (the what if) we could assume whats happening would be going differently too
But if we’re going full conspiracy theory mode, bitmain selling their Bitcoin is a giant red flag and you better do the same really quick, they obviously hold fatally important information that nobody else apparently knows (hey, who knows?)
Interesting read, one thing that has set me up a bit is that they get accused of holding BCH.
If they sell them, they are accused of dumping. If they hold them they are accused of pumping. However they do it they will always get attacked for it, this doesn’t sound right to me.
BCH has a multi-team development situation where BitcoinABC is working with BitcoinUnlimited and some other smaller wallets to add new features. Bitmain might hold and mine BCH, but I don’t think they have any control over the protocol in a similar way that Blockstream (near complete control) has over BTC. BCH development is much more decentralized than BTC - if anything we should take the Blockstream analogy and try to prevent that situation from happening.
Further, BCH is actually scaling on-chain, which was initially thought to be impossible by core developers. It turns out they were wrong.
Canonical ordering of transactions allows for parallelization of processing and will allow for way more TPS than Bitcoin Core is capable of. That might be why Bitmain is focused on BCH instead of BTC, because it’s better for mass adoption outside of exchanges.
I think Zcash should look into this and see if a change like this is possible for Zcash.
Edit: just want to add that the fact that BTC can’t hard fork without being called Bitcoin SomethingElse makes it essentially a speculators “store of value” coin. BCH/ZEC lack that deleterious limitation.
I feel like Bitmain’s massive BCH holding could be seen as a potential liability for investors. The crypto space is already incredibly risky. BTC vs BCH debate aside, it’s even more risky betting against the #1 crypto by market cap that also has the most history and news coverage. By investing into Bitmain’s IPO you’re basically betting against BTC. I’m not taking either side. I hold and like both coins for different reasons. Just my thoughts on the Bitmain IPO.
@shawn I don’t know what the official IPO listing rules are for Hong Kong, but it would not surprise me if Bitmain were currently in some kind of official quiet period and thus unable to respond and correct the record.
