Bitcoin Cash Mining Pulls Brakes

Bitcoin Cash miningis having its dramatic streak again. After a few weeks where mining seemed almost settled, once again disparities in difficulty and miners joining in led to a sharp drop in mining profitability. At one point, the Bitcoin Cash blockchain was mining at 19% of the Bitcoin difficulty- and soon after that, a downward adjustment to 6% of original difficulty brought back profitability.

After a day of blocks coming in faster than intended, in the past 24 hours only a few blocks were mined. And mining fell into the hands of the Unknown entity which has dominated the blockchain in the early days in August.

The problem withBitcoin Cashis that while for the public, it positions itself as the faster and cheaper option, it has some bad days when blocks move at a snail's pace. And at this rate and current market prices, pools like BTC Top quickly moved on to the original chain.

But the situation was only temporary- the gridlock resolved soon and profitability could quickly draw back the miners. AntPool seems to have widened its participation lately, as its founder, Jihan Wu, has shown support for the alternative blockchain.

But finding a way has never been smooth for cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin Cash (BCH) is sliding, threatening to sink again below $400. BCH sank more than 9% in the past few days, and continues to lose as markets are making a recovery.

Bitcoin Cash is getting more support from Bitmain as well. The producer of ASICs for mining SHA-256 will only sell its new S9 mining gear for Bitcoin Cash. Antminer machines have been scarce before, as Bitmain supplies up to a third of the hashing power currently in use. But this time, the message of scarcity also supports Bitcoin Cash.

Here is the new condition to purchase theAntminer S9 13.5 TH/s machine:

"Only BCC payment method is accepted in this batch, please use the exact amount mentioned in your order and complete the payment within one hour. After one hour, the order will expire and your payment may not be detected by the system automatically. If the payment is submitted but the receipt is delayed, we will make your payment "Valid" manually."

Luckily, the 6-hour blocks should not lead to canceled orders for Antminer S9.

At the time of writing the article, Bitcoin Cash is again much more profitable to mine compared to the original chain, as theCoinDancegraph shows.

Bitcoin Cash has not revisited the August profitability heights, but it is still more profitable to mine it by 76% compared to the original blockchain.

Bitcoinhas its separate set of problems, as it went through another transaction gridlock in the past hours. Still, the networkmempoolseems to be lower compared to the peaks in the period May-July and August-September.