Will BTC and BCH halve at the same time? The former’s computing power growth narrows the latter’s lead

Despite the initial differences in the mining speeds of Bitcoin (BTC) and its forked coin Bitcoin Cash (BCH), the increase in BTC’s hashrate has been steadily narrowing BCH’s mining lead, according to cryptoslate July 16. If BTC continues to outpace BCH, then the two cryptocurrencies are likely to halve at the same time.

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BCH's initial mining speed was incredibly fast, leaving Bitcoin far behind

BCH has been struggling to maintain the 10-minute block time it inherited from Bitcoin since its fork in 2017. The goal of the fork was always to maintain the same difficulty and speed as the original Bitcoin chain, and BCH developers have deployed several different algorithms to achieve this goal.

First, both BTC and BCH use a difficulty adjustment algorithm (DAA) that adjusts the mining difficulty parameters every 2016 blocks. However, BCH began implementing another algorithm besides DAA in 2017. The Emergency Difficulty Adjustment (EDA) aims to reduce the mining difficulty of BCH by 20% if fewer than 6 blocks are mined within 12 hours.

However, the introduction of EDA caused serious problems for BCH mining, causing it to mine hundreds of thousands of blocks earlier than BTC. Even after the EDA was removed and the DAA changes were implemented, the difference in the number of blocks between the two remained. The overall increase in block numbers, mining speed, and hashrate means that BCH is expected to halve more than a month earlier than BTC.

BTC’s recent hashrate growth means it could surpass BCH

Nic Carter, co-founder of Coinmetrics.io and partner at CastleIsland Ventures, recently pointed out these issues in a series of tweets published on July 14. Carter stated that BTC mining has been lagging behind BCH, and as early as November 2017, BCH mined more than 123,000 coins than BTC. One of the tweets reads:

“Fun fact: when BCH forked, mining started out “too slow”, then “too fast”, and has lagged behind BTC since EDA. So BCH mined 123k more coins than BTC, but recent gains in BTC hashrate have cut BCH’s lead to 73k.”

However, the growth of BTC’s hashrate has narrowed the gap to 73,000 this month. Carter pointed out that the difference in the number of coins in each network can also be reflected in the issuance schedule as a halving “a few days earlier.” Since 2017, the gap between the halvings of BCH and BTC has been steadily narrowing, and BCH is currently only 41 days ahead.

Carter said that if BTC continues to narrow the production gap of 239 BTC per day and continues to maintain its computing power advantage, BTC and BCH are likely to halve at the same time.

While this will only happen if BTC’s hashrate maintains the same growth rate it has been experiencing since 2017, even a slight reduction in BCH’s “pre-halving days” would show just how much the BTC network is slowing down.