By design the Bitcoin Cash network upgrades every 6 months. There were some proposed network upgrades that a certain influential mining group led by someone claiming to be the creator of Bitcoin disagreed with, and decided to band together with some other large miners to hard fork with their own protocol changes.

The changes were mostly around blocksize (the camp that disagreed wanted larger block sizes), how transactions are ordered in a block, and adding/removing certain functions.

I haven't followed the split very closely at all, but "someone claiming to be the creator of Bitcoin" really understates things. That someone is Craig Wright. Craig is _obviously_ not Satoshi (the creator of Bitcoin) -- he is a transparent fraudster, lacks technical understanding, and is unhinged (see his tweets and crazy threatening emails).

I think a lot of this is just stemming from Craig's ongoing desire to fraudulently control Bitcoin by claiming to be it's creator (the fork is called "Satoshi's Vision").

I'd stay far away from anything he touches.

Yes, I've followed his tweets on occasion. I'm not saying I think he is Satoshi. His "unhinged" Twitter behavior is not any more crazy than a certain leader of the free world IMO and on par with the general eccentricities that is crypto right now.

This email is pretty unhinged: https://coinjournal.net/craig-wright-threatens-to-crash-bitc...

Comparing him to Trump only speaks to the fact that Trump also has issues, not that Craig does not.

Moreover, the style of writing/behavior is polar opposite of Satoshi.

I feel similarly about both CW and RV. This hash war may have been a nice moment of drama diversion but from a professional point of view, it's an awful game to bring to the crypto world and for noobs who have just begun watching.

It’s honestly probably not that interesting. Cryptocoins split all the time. Bitcoin has A dozen of forks, same for Ethereum, same for ...

How are you supposed to add users and grow a network if its is constantly broken apart for ideological reasons?

Well I mean Christianity's been doing it pretty well for a long time now.

The Bitcoin Cash folks didn't want to use a new cryptocurrency, they already had bitcoin and wanted to use it more like cash (i.e., low transaction fees). Basically, there was a large subset of Bitcoin users who did not agree with the development roadmap as set by the core Bitcoin developers. The core developers did not do enough to accommodate this subset of bitcoin users (there are technical reasons why they refused to do so, though their validity is debatable), so the codebase and blockchain were forked. It's a little confusing, but the most reasonable outcome since the community was at a political standstill for years and now both groups are free to do their own thing.

Nonono, the fork has just forked itself again after 15.5 months.

I _think_ the split came down to how to support the increasing rate of txn/s. The Bitcoin cash folks wanted to increase the "block size" which required a hard fork. The Bitcoin "board" wanted to implement a new "protocol" called lightning instead.

Ah, I was talking about the new split, I understand the original fork was over the blocksize cap.

Just the normal agreed-upon fork every 6 months but this time things heated up with the hashing war, which featured antminer pulled all the miners in his pool from BTC into BCH, causing downward price pressure.