Why nobody is mining Bitcoin Cash

After the fork of Bitcoin cash, we have a situation whereby there is a lack of blocks being mined on bitcoin cash, to a point where we have to wait up to 13 hours for a block. This is creating a situation where users have to wait for a long time to wait for confirmations before the transactions take place (very frustrating if you want to send your bitcoin cash to an exchange, which typically waits for 3 confirmations).

These gaps are due to the randomness of block creation.

Why nobody is mining

The reason why nobody is mining bitcoin cash is that it's not profitable, rather its nowhere near as profitable as bitcoin. When the fork happened, bitcoin cash inherited Bitcoin's mining difficulty. That means right now, the mining difficulty is the SAME, but the payout is in Bitcoin cash instead of Bitcoin. This means miners would get paid in an inferior currency for the same amount of work. Assuming miners are doing this for profit, it makes no business sense to mine bitcoin cash until the difficulty reduces.

ViaBTC

One thing that is surprising is how few blocks are mined by ViaBTC - the guys who originally proposed this and started trading this before the split. Guess they still want their fat bitcoin payouts

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