2018-11-25

On November 15th the Bitcoin Cash blockchain split into two branches, lead by the ABC and SV development teams. This has been a contentious split, and Memo has many users on either side of the debate.

We are launching abc.memo.cash and sv.memo.cash to make it easy to see which Memo data exists on each chain.

These two domains have the same user accounts. It is recommended to continue using memo.cash and only use the SV and ABC domains for informational purposes.

We have re-enabled funding transactions. There are also two new settings, Split protection and Broadcast to both chains.

Split protection prevents combining inputs, which could taint existing coins. This has been enabled since the fork and will continue to be on by default but can now be turned off. Be careful if turning off this setting, dust consolidation can cause existing coins to be split, for example if you received a tip with a split coin. In the future inputs that are verified on both chains can be safely combined, but that has not been implemented yet. If your account needs safe dust consolidation it is recommended to do it manually.

Broadcast to both chains is also on by default. For the Memo.cash domain this setting cannot be disabled. If using SV or ABC Memo.cash sites you can disable this setting but it is recommended to leave it enabled. Regardless, all transactions are being relayed between chains, so even if an action is only broadcast to one chain there is a high likelihood it will get replayed on the other chain anyway.

Until we have better support we must choose a default chain to follow on Memo.cash. While bitcoin has been mainly governed by users so far, we think miners will eventually control the network with hash power. Long-term we think the best policy is to follow the chain with the most proof-of-work.

We realize in the literal sense that this would mean following the BTC chain, but that chain has already abandoned Nakamoto Consensus (NC). Bitcoin Cash supporters have generally supported NC, since with NC the block size would likely have been increased years before the ceiling was hit.

Memo.cash will by default use the chain with the most proof-of-work, of chains that support Nakamoto Consensus. At this point, ten days after the split, ABC has more PoW. The main Memo.cash site, while implementing anti-split protections, has had ABC as its default since the split. However, if SV were to overtake ABC in total PoW the Memo.cash site would switch to that chain as the default. As part of this, we recommend not splitting coins and continuing to broadcast all transactions to both chains.

If you have questions or feedback, please contact us.