Bitcoin may be winning the battle for investment dollars, but when it comes to attracting mining power, competition is heating up.
After the bitcoin cash blockchain experienced a major adjustment this weekend, the less than one-month-old cryptocurrency has seen a dramatic reduction in mining difficulty, and perhaps more crucially, an increase in its profitability for those providing computing power as a means to secure its ledger.
At press time, bitcoin cash has now attracted nearly 30% of the mining power of the bitcoin network, a figure that is up from just 5% two days earlier.
As profiled by CoinDesk last week, the move sets the stage for a high-profile, real-time test of how two large blockchain markets might compete at scale. As both bitcoin cash (BCC or BCH) and bitcoin (BTC) use proof-of-work to secure their transaction histories, both networks are now effectively competing for hash power.
So, while bitcoin cash may have struggled to produce blocks after the split (miners initially earned less money), that has now changed.
As of last Friday, bitcoin miners are now earning more through the creation of new bitcoin cash, as developers and miners have worked to lower the bitcoin cash difficulty rating that regulates its rewards.