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In order to provide users with a better user experience, more functions, and a good development environment for application development, BCH has been continuously improving its technology. The twice-yearly network upgrade is the best manifestation of its optimization. The first network upgrade in 2019 is imminent, and the community has been preparing for it recently. As the upgrade progresses, major media are also competing to report on it.
Although the BCH network upgrade is already a routine event, there are still several issues that need to be emphasized for this upgrade.
The specific time of BCH network upgrade
According to the BCH official website and the BCH community's upgrade plan, BCH will undergo a hard fork upgrade at UNIX timestamp 1557921600. The time is approximately after 12:00 UTC on May 15, 2019 (21:00 Beijing time on May 15, 2019), and there is less than a week left.
Contents of BCH network upgrade
This upgrade of BCH will add two new protocol features: Segwit recovery and the much-anticipated Schnorr signature.
About Enabling Schnorr Signatures
Schnorr signature is a digital signature scheme. Currently, BCH uses the ECDSA signature scheme. In comparison, the Schnorr signature scheme has many advantages. First, Schnorr signature allows a very simple multi-party aggregation scheme, in which multiple parties collaborate under an aggregated public key to generate an aggregate signature, which can reduce the storage and bandwidth of the BCH chain and is of great help to the data expansion of BCH. In addition, this feature also helps to improve user privacy protection. Secondly, Schnorr signature can help BCH hide payment channels and atomic swaps as ordinary payments. Finally, since the aggregated Schnorr signature cannot be tampered with by any strict subset of participants, this means that we can build a second-layer network on BCH, such as the Lightning Network. And this also helps to deploy more complex smart contracts on BCH.
While the switch from ECDSA to Schnorr is completely optional in this upgrade, there are some very clear benefits to implementing this change. In addition to scalability and privacy, Schnorr also provides a feature for wallet platforms that use the protocol: replay protection.
About Segregated Witness Recovery
As we all know, when BCH was first created, it had no isolated witness in addition to the block size compared to Bitcoin core. The isolated witness recovery function does not mean that the isolated witness will be added back to BCH, but it is a function that benefits the people. During the upgrade in November 2018, there was a change to enforce the cleanup stack rule in order to reduce scalability, but it also brought a side effect, making it impossible to recover BCH that was accidentally sent to the Segwit BTC address. For example, suppose a BCH is sent to a segregated witness address. Due to the cleanup stack rule, this BCH cannot be received through the BCH link. However, after adding the segregated witness recovery function, this rule will not include the segregated witness address, and the BCH that was sent by mistake can be retrieved.
Will this BCH network upgrade generate new coins?
This upgrade of BCH has been agreed upon by the BCH community as a whole, so no new coins will be generated. Although this BCH network upgrade was carried out through a hard fork, the hard fork is only a technical means for the purpose of upgrading. In addition, BCH carried an automatic replay protection function in the newly released version 0.18 during the upgrade in November last year. When the 0.19 version of the protocol is activated, the 0.18 version of the protocol will automatically add replay protection. This means that after the upgrade, various existing wallets and other ecological facilities will automatically be compatible with the 0.19 version, and will automatically be incompatible with the 0.18 version. Even if someone mines the original chain (0.18 version of the protocol), no new currency will be generated.
What do we need to do about BCH network upgrade?
If you are running a Bitcoin Cash node, you should upgrade your software to the latest version before the BCH upgrade. If you are just an ordinary user, you can contact the node operator to remind them to upgrade. The latest versions of BCH full node clients that are currently compatible with this network upgrade include Bitcoin ABC 0.19.4, Bchd 0.14.2, Bitprim 0.19.0, and Bitcoin Unlimited Cash 1.6.0.0.
Note: The BitcoinXT full node client has not been upgraded this time. Nodes that previously ran BitcoinXT need to switch to other clients. After the upgrade, the BitcoinXT software will be outdated.
Current node upgrade status
Most of the BCH nodes use Bitcoin ABC and Bitcoin Unlimited Cash clients. According to the data from the bchnodes.online website, there are currently 661 nodes running the Bitcoin Unlimited Cash client, 429 of which have been updated to version 1.6.0, accounting for 64.9%. There are 579 nodes running the Bitcoin ABC client, and 260 of which have been updated to version 0.19.0 or above, accounting for 44.9%.
Although there is only one week left before the upgrade, I believe that through the joint efforts of the BCH community, the upgrade will be successfully completed. The upgraded BCH will bring us more surprises! (Bitcoin Home)
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