Bitcoin Cash Close to Reaching Development Fundraising Goal

Despite its initial struggles, the fundraiser for Bitcoin Cash development has seen a very successful week. The 800 BCH goal has been almost reached with 41 more days of crowdfunding still remaining. A total of 913 donations worth 761.85 have been gathered for the four most popular teams working on Bitcoin Cash client software.

When it comes to donations to individual wallet implementations, Bitcoin ABC has received the most, closely followed by Bitcoin Unlimited. There has been tension between the once united development teams, as Amaury Sechet has made his departure from Bitcoin Unlimited public, blaming BU for their inefficient process. Multiple community members have also accused Bitcoin Unlimited of legitimising Craig Wright after receiving funding from nChain – an allegation that the team’s lead developer Andrew Stone officially took the time to refute, reminding that some of the earliest criticisms of Craig Wright came from the Bitcoin Unlimited team. In addition, the majority of BU members have voted against Bitcoin SV support.

Golang-based full node implementation Bchd has also received significant direct funding by the community. Led by OpenBazaar’s Chris Pacia and Josh Ellithorpe of Coinbase, it has seen a quick rise in fame in the past year.

Bcash has also received donations, albeit a significantly smaller sum. This is probably to be expected, as this particular node implementation is not striving to receive large market share, but rather, to cater to the needs of purse.io. For the unaware, Purse is a website which allows users to buy items from amazon at a large discount if they pay in Bitcoin or Bitcoin Cash. The node implementation is written in node.js and its github repository claims that it is no longer supported.

The slow start of the fundraising campaign raised some fundamental questions – specifically whether community funding could be enough in such a competitive environment, where large companies such as Blockstream and nChain, massive ICO campaigns, coin premines, as well as decentralised autonomous organisations such as that of Dash have obvious advantages when it comes to funding.

For the time being, it does appear that the Bitcoin Cash community is capable of showing generosity and appreciation for the work of the developers, and it is seemingly aware of the importance of this funding campaign. Only time will tell if this can remain true over the long run.