We are a group of enthusiasts who have been involved, in one way or the other, with the IRC technology over the years; a group of people who over the years managed to maintain their server and webchat users. On the basis of our experience, which we have gained so far, in 2017, we created the largest IRC network in Bulgaria – the BGIRC Network. To date, the registered nicknames on the network are about 500, the registered channels are just over 200, and there are more than 800 regular users during peak hours – all of this was built on 5 servers. The idea behind the creation of the network was to connect people from all over the world, and to create a “safe space”, where they can spend their free time, talk to friends, meet new people and just enjoy themselves without worrying that they are being tracked in any way. We guarantee the anonymity of all the people who visit our servers. We have strict personal data confidentiality rules, which all of our users know and respect. In time, the network took on a life of its own and many new channels came to be created, where people share their professional or personal experience and stories with the freedom of anonymity. Currently, there are specialized channels for programmers, for gamers, for linux experts and others. The network, its servers, systems and maintenance are all financed out-of-pocket by the creators and administrators, with no outside investors. But in order to continue to maintain all that we have built so far and to be able to improve our systems, we need to increase our budget with some outside help – with your help! Thank you to everyone who decides to support our cause and you are always welcome to BGIRC Network to have a chat!

More info: http://bgirc.com/

Whonix A High Security Method of Surfing the Internet
Whonix is a desktop operating system designed for advanced security and privacy. Whonix ™ mitigates the threat of common attack vectors while maintaining usability. Online anonymity is realized via fail-safe, automatic, and desktop-wide use of the Tor network. A heavily reconfigured Debian base is run inside multiple virtual machines, providing a substantial layer of protection from malware and IP address leaks. Commonly used applications are pre-installed and safely pre-configured for immediate use. The user is not jeopardized by installing additional applications or personalizing the desktop. Whonix ™ is under active development and is the only operating system designed to be run inside a VM and paired with Tor.

Privacy ecosystem that utilizes compartmentalization to provide a private, leak-resistant environment.

Whonix is being used by Edward Snowden, journalists such as Micah Lee, used by the Freedom of the Press Foundation and Qubes OS. It has a 7 years history of keeping its users safe from real world attacks.

More info: https://www.whonix.org/

Our Mission
We build a free and open source complete 3D creation pipeline for artists and small teams, by publicly managed projects on blender.org. Blender is your own 3D software.

The Organization
The Blender Foundation (2002) is an independent public benefit organization. Its spin-off corporation Blender Institute (2007) hosts the foundation’s offices and currently employs 15 people who work on the Blender software and creative projects to validate and test Blender in production environments.

These organizations support the community of contributors on blender.org. That is where Blender is being made.

The License
Blender is Free Software. You are free to use Blender for any purpose, including commercially or for education. This freedom is being defined by Blender’s GNU General Public License (GPL).

The Software
Blender is the free and open source 3D creation suite. It supports the entirety of the 3D pipeline—modeling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing and motion tracking, even video editing and game creation. Advanced users employ Blender’s API for Python scripting to customize the application and write specialized tools; often these are included in Blender’s future releases. Blender is well suited to individuals and small studios who benefit from its unified pipeline and responsive development process. Examples from many Blender-based projects are available in the showcase.

Blender is cross-platform and runs equally well on Linux, Windows, and Macintosh computers. Its interface uses OpenGL to provide a consistent experience. To confirm specific compatibility, the list of supported platforms indicates those regularly tested by the development team.

As a community-driven project under the GNU General Public License (GPL), the public is empowered to make small and large changes to the code base, which leads to new features, responsive bug fixes, and better usability. Blender has no price tag, but you can invest, participate, and help to advance a powerful collaborative tool: Blender is your own 3D software.

More help is always welcome! From developing and improving Blender to writing documentation, etc, there are a number of different things you can do to get involved.

More info: https://www.blender.org/

What is WikiLeaks

WikiLeaks is a multi-national media organization and associated library. It was founded by its publisher Julian Assange in 2006.

WikiLeaks specializes in the analysis and publication of large datasets of censored or otherwise restricted official materials involving war, spying and corruption. It has so far published more than 10 million documents and associated analyses.

“WikiLeaks is a giant library of the world’s most persecuted documents. We give asylum to these documents, we analyze them, we promote them and we obtain more.” – Julian Assange, Der Spiegel Interview

WikiLeaks has contractual relationships and secure communications paths to more than 100 major media organizations from around the world. This gives WikiLeaks sources negotiating power, impact and technical protections that would otherwise be difficult or impossible to achieve.

Although no organization can hope to have a perfect record forever, thus far WikiLeaks has a perfect in document authentication and resistance to all censorship attempts.

WikiLeaks, its publisher and its journalists have won many awards, including:

* The Economist New Media Award (2008)
* The Amnesty New Media Award (2009)
* TIME Magazine Person of the Year, People’s Choice (highest global vote) (2010)
* The Sam Adams Award for Integrity (2010)
* The National Union of Journalists Journalist of the Year (Hrafnsson) (2011)
* The Sydney Peace Foundation Gold Medal (2011)
* The Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism (2011)
* The Blanquerna Award for Best Communicator (2011)
* The Walkley Award for Most Outstanding Contribution to Journalism (2011)
* The Voltaire Award for Free Speech (2011)
* The International Piero Passetti Journalism Prize of the National Union of Italian Journalists (2011)
* The Jose Couso Press Freedom Award (2011)
* The Privacy International Hero of Privacy (2012)
* The Global Exchange Human Rights People’s Choice Award (2013)
* The Yoko Ono Lennon Courage Award for the Arts (2013)
* The Brazillian Press Association Human Rights Award (2013)
* The Kazakstan Union of Journalists Top Prize (2014)

As well as nominations for the UN Mandela Prize (2015) and nominations in six consecutive years for the Nobel Peace Prize (2010-2015)

WikiLeaks is entirely funded by its publisher, its publication sales and the general public.

WikiLeaks has more than one hundred other staff accross the Americas, Africa, Eurasia and the Asia Pacific.

The WikiLeaks Files (Verso, Sep 2015)

WikiLeaks legal team is lead by judge Baltasar Garzón in Europe and in the United States, Michael Ratner, president emeritus of Center for Constitutional Rights.

WikiLeaks ongoing legal cases are best described in this UN report (2015) from the Center for Constitutional Rights

Julian Assange’s ongoing detention without charge is best described here: https://justice4assange.com/3-Years-in-Embassy.html

“This great library built from the courage and sweat of many has had a five-year confrontation with a powerpower without losing a single “book”. At the same time, these “books” have educated many, and in some cases, in a literal sense, let the innocent go free.” – Julian Assange, Der Spiegel Interview

More info: https://wikileaks.org/

Who Is Edward Snowden?
Edward Snowden is a 31 year old US citizen, former Intelligence Community officer and whistleblower. The documents he revealed provided a vital public window into the NSA and its international intelligence partners’ secret mass surveillance programs and capabilities. These revelations generated unprecedented attention around the world on privacy intrusions and digital security, leading to a global debate on the issue.

Snowden worked in various roles within the US Intelligence Community, including serving undercover for the CIA overseas. He most recently worked as an infrastructure analyst at the NSA, through a Booz Allen Hamilton contract, when he left his home and family in Hawaii to blow the whistle in May 2013. After travelling to Hong Kong, Snowden revealed documents to the American public on the NSA’s mass surveillance programs, which were shown to be operating without any public oversight and outside the limits of the US Constitution. The US government has charged Snowden with theft of government property, and two further charges under the 1917 Espionage Act. Each charge carries a maximum 10-year prison sentence.

With the US pursuing his extradition, Snowden is now in Russia, where he was formally granted three years’ residency from 1 August 2014, after a year of temporary asylum in Russia ended on 31st July 2014. Journalists continue to publish documents from Snowden that reveal the secret and unaccountable systems of modern global surveillance.

Edward Snowden: Sam Adams Award
Snowden talks at the Sam Adams Award award ceremony in October 2013 about the secret surveillance he revealed and its dangers to democracy.

One of the tasks of the trustees is to oversee the functioning of Courage, which has been set up to raise money for journalistic sources’ legal defence campaigns. Edward Snowden is its first recipient, but he will not be its last. We expect to be supporting more journalistic sources and whistleblowers in the future and we expect to grow as more journalistic sources are nominated as recipients.

It is the only fund endorsed by Edward Snowden. If you see others claiming to raise revenue for Edward Snowden, please report them to the trustees at: [email protected]

To contact us about any issue involving the site, or how to volunteer, please email: [email protected]

Edward Snowden has been charged by the US government with theft, “unauthorized communication of national defense information” and “willful communication of classified communications intelligence information to an unauthorized person”. The last two charges fall under the 1917 Espionage Act.

Each of the three charges carry a maximum of ten years in prison plus a fine, totalling a possible 30-year sentence. It is possible that further charges may be brought against Snowden.

The US administration has already taken many actions towards the extradition of Edward Snowden. Not only have arrest and extradition warrants been issued to numerous countries, but US officials have also personally pressured political leaders and threatened to cut trade benefits for failure to pursue Snowden’s extradition. People who have assisted, or are suspected of associating with, Snowden have also been put at risk or harassed, including WikiLeaks journalist Sarah Harrison, who accompanied Edward Snowden during his transit from Hong Kong to Moscow, and journalist Glenn Greenwald’s partner David Miranda, who was detained for nine hours under the UK’s Terrorism Act while transiting through Heathrow airport.

Edward Snowden risks an unfair trial as there is no public interest or whistleblower exception under the Espionage Act. This means Snowden would be unable to use his intent as a defence. In an interview, he explained the reasoning behind his revelations: “I can’t in good conscience allow the US government to destroy privacy, internet freedom and basic liberties for people around the world with this massive surveillance machine they’re secretly building.”

Snowden is not only at risk of legal punishments, but physical as well. Despite a letter from US Attorney-General Eric Holder that Edward Snowden would not be subject to the death penalty or torture, Michael Ratner, president emeritus of the Center for Constitutional Rights, notes that these comments are “meaningless“. On the subject of torture Mr Ratner commented:

“Think about how the US defines torture. The US doesn’t really think that anything it did under the Bush era was torture, with the exception possibly of waterboarding. So that means Ed Snowden can be subjected to every enhanced interrogation techniques – you know, lights on all the time, loud noise, cold temperatures, hot temperatures, strapped into a chair. All of the, quote, ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ are allowed under US view of torture.” He also commented: “It doesn’t say anything in the letter [that the US] won’t put him into some underground cell and keep him there the rest of his life.”

To understand the threats against Edward Snowden, one need look no further than the other whistleblowers who have been prosecuted by the Obama administration. The Obama adminsitration boasts about the fact that they have “prosecuted twice as many cases under the Espionage Act as all other administrations combined”. A notable case is that of Chelsea Manning, who after three years of pretrial detainment, including under unlawful conditions, was sentenced to 35 years in prison.

The Obama administration’s crackdown on national security journalism and its whistleblowers has been escalating for some time and Edward Snowden’s revelations place him in the crosshairs.

More info: https://edwardsnowden.com/

Sea Shepherd was founded in 1977 by Captain Paul Watson in Vancouver, Canada, with the mission to protect and conserve all marine wildlife. Incorporated in Oregon in 1981 as the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, today the movement has independent entities in over 20 countries working together on direct-action campaigns around the world. Navigate our timeline on here.
Our Mission
Sea Shepherd Conservation Society is the world’s most passionate and powerful protector of ocean life. We are on a mission to defend, conserve and protect the seas and marine wildlife like no organization can.

From its earliest years, Sea Shepherd has embraced the mandate of the United Nations World Charter for Nature to uphold international conservation laws. With the largest private navy on the planet, we collaborate with governments who share our ships and use their authority to intervene and enforce the law.

To save marine wildlife and ecosystems, we take more than a stand. We take action.

Our Approach
“The oceans are the last free place on the planet” – Paul Watson
paul imageWe are risk-takers. For over 40 years, we have grown from a small organization to a global movement of thousands of passionate volunteers from dozens of nations. What has never changed is our attitude.

We put ourselves on the front lines to expose the truth, save marine wildlife, conduct vital research and stop illegal activity through collaborative campaigns with communities and governments through lawful means and in accordance to international charters and declarations.

Our commitment has led us to protect marine wildlife—including endangered or threatened species—and their delicate habitats. We have cut illegal nets, cleaned vital ecosystems, shutdown illegal operations in contentious waters, and even delivered humanitarian supplies. We never stop because the survival of our ocean is a constant challenge. It is an enduring commitment and a long-term solution.

Life began in the ocean. We must Defend, Conserve and Protect it. Now and always.

Our mission is to educate and inspire today’s youth to become tomorrow’s scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs of nanotechnology.

OUR VISION: We envision future generations of American students who are educated in and passionate about nanotechnology.
We believe that by learning nanotechnology as early as high school, our students will be better prepared for their professional careers in the globalized, high-tech economy of the 21st century.

OUR MOTIVATION: Investing in STEM education today will result in a skilled workforce tomorrow, who will ultimately make significant contributions to the health and prosperity of the world. We are committed to making an excellent nanotechnology education available to every high school and college student nationwide.

OUR GOALS:

To inspire youth to pursue STEM and become the leading scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs of nanotechnology.
To provide every student the opportunity to take a nanotechnology course, either in a classroom or online, using a high-quality curriculum, entirely developed, produced, and distributed by Omni Nano.
If you share our passions and want to make a difference in STEM education, get involved now!

More info: https://omninano.org/

The largest file sharing platform in the world

Bittorrent indexer, Peer-to-peer filesharing.

More info : https://thepiratebay.org/

The purpose of Linux Mint is to produce a modern, elegant and comfortable operating system which is both powerful and easy to use.

Linux Mint is one of the most popular desktop Linux distributions and used by millions of people.

Some of the reasons for the success of Linux Mint are:

* It works out of the box, with full multimedia support and is extremely easy to use.
* It’s both free of cost and open source.
* It’s community-driven. Users are encouraged to send feedback to the project so that their ideas can be used to improve Linux Mint.
* Based on Debian and Ubuntu, it provides about 30,000 packages and one of the best software managers.
* It’s safe and reliable. Thanks to a conservative approach to software updates, a unique Update Manager and the robustness of its Linux architecture, Linux Mint requires very little maintenance (no regressions, no antivirus, no anti-spyware…etc).

More info: https://www.linuxmint.com/

The mission of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) is to provide software for the public good. We do this by providing services and support for many like-minded software project communities consisting of individuals who choose to participate in ASF activities.

WHAT IS THE ASF?
Established in 1999, the ASF is a US 501(c)(3) charitable organization, funded by individual donations and corporate sponsors. Our all-volunteer board oversees more than 350 leading Open Source projects, including Apache HTTP Server — the world’s most popular Web server software.

The ASF provides an established framework for intellectual property and financial contributions that simultaneously limits potential legal exposure for our project committers. Through the ASF’s meritocratic process known as “The Apache Way,” more than 730 individual Members and 7,000 Committers successfully collaborate to develop freely available enterprise-grade software, benefiting millions of users worldwide: thousands of software solutions are distributed under the Apache License; and the community actively participates in ASF mailing lists, mentoring initiatives, and ApacheCon, the Foundation’s official user conference, trainings, and expo.

HOW DID THE ASF AND APACHE® PROJECTS GROW?¶
Formerly known as the Apache Group, the ASF was incorporated in 1999 as a membership-based, not-for-profit corporation in order to ensure that the Apache projects continue to exist beyond the participation of individual volunteers. Individuals who have demonstrated a commitment to collaborative open-source software development, through sustained participation and contributions within the Foundation’s projects, are eligible for membership in the ASF. An individual is awarded membership after nomination and approval by a majority of the existing ASF members. Thus, the ASF is governed by the community it most directly serves — the people collaborating within its projects.

HOW ARE THE ASF AND APACHE PROJECTS GOVERNED?
The ASF members periodically elect a Board of Directors to manage the organizational affairs of the Foundation, as accorded by the ASF Bylaws. The Board, in turn, appoints a number of officers to oversee the day-to-day operations of the Foundation. A number of public records of our operation are made available to the community. A more detailed explanation of How the ASF works in terms of day to day operations is available, and the Apache Community Development project’s goal is to help newcomers learn more about the Apache Software Foundation.

Individual Apache projects are in turn governed directly by Project Management Committees (PMC) made up of individuals who have shown merit and leadership within those projects. There are detailed descriptions of ASF and project governance models.

More info: http://www.apache.org/

The amnestic incognito live system for privacy and anonymity.

Tails is free because nobody should have to pay to be safe while using computers.
Tails is used more than 25 000 times every day:

* Journalists and whistleblowers use Tails to denounce the wrongdoings of governments and corporations.
* Activists use Tails to avoid surveillance and organize their struggles for liberatory social change.
* Human-rights defenders use Tails to avoid censorship and report human-rights violations.
* Domestic violence survivors use Tails to escape surveillance in their homes.
* Privacy-concerned citizens use Tails to avoid online tracking.

But, not everyone using Tails can donate. When you donate, you are offering to many others who need it, the very precious tool that is Tails.

Donations from individuals like you are our most valuable source of funding as they make Tails more independent from government and corporate funding. We are a very small non-profit and our yearly budget is ridiculously small compared to the value of Tails.

Donate today to protect and sustain Tails!

Our Mission
Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization that protects, defends, and empowers public-interest journalism in the 21st century.

The organization works to preserve and strengthen First and Fourth Amendment rights guaranteed to the press through a variety of avenues, including the development of encryption tools, documentation of attacks on the press, training newsrooms on digital security practices, and advocating for the public’s right to know.

Freedom of the Press Foundation is built on the recognition that this kind of transparency journalism — from publishing the Pentagon Papers and exposing Watergate, to uncovering the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping program and CIA secret prisons — doesn’t just happen. It requires dogged work by journalists, and often, the courage of whistleblowers and others who work to ensure that the public actually learns what it has a right to know.

Our Work
We accomplish our mission in several ways:

SecureDrop. We lead the development of SecureDrop, an open source platform for secure communication between sources and media organizations, and we support its adoption by newsrooms around the world. SecureDrop is available in 10 languages and used by more than 70 media organizations world-wide, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Associated Press, The Intercept, USA Today, CBC, and The Guardian.

Digital Security Trainings. We conduct in-person digital security trainings with journalists and filmmakers to help teach them about digital security tools and offer them the best available technologies to protect themselves and their sources.

U.S. Press Freedom Tracker. In partnership with the Committee to Protect Journalists, we run the US Press Freedom Tracker, a website for monitoring press freedom violations in the United States. This nonpartisan news website is the first to provide reliable, easy-to-access information on the number of press freedom violations in the United States—from journalists facing charges to those stopped at the US border or physically attacked while on the job.

Encryption Tools & Special Projects. We also build a variety of experimental technology projects that aim to protect journalists or promote transparency. In 2017, we helped release an Android app called Haven, which can use the sensors on anyone’s smartphone to act as a security system for your surroundings. The project is open source and does not send any information to the cloud. We also built a Twitter bot called FOIA Feed which automatically collects stories that rely on the Freedom of Information Act from over a dozen different news outlets. Additionally, we built a tool that can archive at-risk news outlets which are in danger of being blocked or deleted from the web and it was credited by reporters as being a factor in stopping Peter Thiel from buying and permanently deleting Gawker.

News and Advocacy. We engage in public and legal advocacy around critical press freedom issues, including excessive government secrecy, the protection of whistleblowers, the surveillance of journalists, the Freedom of Information Act, and reporter’s privilege.

Crowdfunding. Non-profit media, independent transparency organizations, and open-source security tools are increasingly a critical component of the journalism landscape. We aim to broaden the financial base of these types of projects by crowd-sourcing funding and making it easy for people to support the best journalism from an array of organizations all in one place.

Our Vision
Freedom of the Press Foundation aims to protect and promote the basic human right of freedom of the press, both in the United States, and abroad, in a world where surveillance, censorship, and manipulation are becoming more sophisticated and more pervasive. Public interest journalism — the kind of journalism that holds power accountable and defends human rights — is under threat everywhere.

Our goal is to ensure that all news organizations worldwide recognize that digital security is a critical press freedom issue in the 21st century. To protect journalists, their sources and their audiences, it is imperative that newsrooms use best-available security tools and practices, including encryption of sensitive communications and materials, anonymization of sources, and distribution of news through secure and censorship-resistant channels.

Our Mission

We partner with world-changing activists.
We defend, equip, and give a platform to human rights activists who are boldly changing their communities and countries.

We create innovative solutions.
We connect activists to industry leaders and develop modern solutions to combat the worst human rights violations.

We activate millions of supporters.
We amplify the impact of our activists by inspiring people around the world to participate in our initiatives.

Who We are
We are a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that promotes and protects human rights globally, with a focus on closed societies. HRF unites people in the common cause of defending human rights and promoting liberal democracy. Our mission is to ensure that freedom is both preserved and promoted around the world.

We focus our work on the founding ideals of the human rights movement, those most purely represented in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), and the 1976 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR).

Contact:

350 5th Ave #4202
New York, NY 10118

Phone: +1 (212) 246-8486
Email: [email protected]

More info: https://hrf.org/

Without the hardworking independent developers who build and improve the Bitcoin Cash (BCH) network itself, our mission of helping the world access a fairer financial system wouldn’t be possible.

What is Bitcoin Cash?
Bitcoin cash is a cryptocurrency created in August 2017, from a fork of Bitcoin. Bitcoin Cash increases the size of blocks, allowing more transactions to be processed. The cryptocurrency underwent another fork in November 2018 and split into Bitcoin Cash ABC and Bitcoin Cash SV (Satoshi Vision). Bitcoin Cash is referred to as Bitcoin Cash because it uses the original Bitcoin Cash client.

Understanding Bitcoin Cash
The difference between Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash is philosophical.

As proposed by Bitcoin inventor Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin was meant to be a peer-to-peer cryptocurrency that was used for daily transactions. Over the years, as it gained mainstream traction and its price surged, Bitcoin became an investment vehicle instead of a currency. Its blockchain witnessed scalability issues because it could not handle the increased number of transactions. The confirmation time and fees for a transaction on bitcoin’s blockchain surged. This was mainly due to the 1MB block size limitation for bitcoin. Transactions queued up, waiting for confirmation, because blocks could not handle the increase in size for transactions.

Bitcoin Cash proposes to remedy the situation by increasing the size of blocks to between 8 MB and 32 MB, thereby enabling processing of more transactions per block. The average number of transactions per block on Bitcoin is between 1,000 and 1,500. The number of transactions on Bitcoin Cash’s blockchain during a stress test in Sep 2018 surged to 25,000 per block.

Major proponents of Bitcoin Cash, such as Roger Ver, often invoke Nakamoto’s original vision of a payment service as reason to increase block size. According to them, the change in bitcoin’s block size will enable bitcoin’s use as a medium for daily transactions and help it compete with multinational credit card processing organizations, such as Visa, which charge high fees to process transactions across borders.

Bitcoin Cash also differs from bitcoin in another respect. It does not incorporate Segregated Witness (SegWit), another solution proposed to accommodate more transactions per block. SegWit retains only information or the metadata relating to a transaction in a block. Typically, all details pertaining to a transaction are stored in a block.

Ideological and block size differences apart, there are several similarities between Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash. Both use the Proof of Work (PoW) consensus mechanism to mine new coins. They also share the services of Bitmain, the world’s biggest cryptocurrency miner. The supply of Bitcoin Cash is capped at 21 million, the same figure as Bitcoin. Bitcoin Cash also started off using the same difficulty algorithm – Emergency Difficulty Adjustment (EDA) – which adjusts difficulty every 2016 blocks or roughly every two weeks. Miners took advantage of this similarity by alternating their mining activity between Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash. While it was profitable for miners, the practice was detrimental to increasing supply of Bitcoin Cash in the markets. Hence, Bitcoin Cash has revised its EDA algorithm to make it easier for miners to generate the cryptocurrency.

History of Bitcoin Cash
In 2010, the average size of a block on Bitcoin’s blockchain was less than 100 KB and the average fee for a transaction amounted to a couple of cents. This made its blockchain vulnerable to attacks, consisting entirely of cheap transactions, that could potentially cripple its system. To prevent such a situation, the size of a block on bitcoin’s blockchain was limited to 1 MB. Each block was generated every 10 minutes, allowing for space and time between successive transactions. The limitation on size and time required to generate a block added another layer of security on bitcoin’s blockchain.

But those safeguards proved to be a hindrance when bitcoin gained mainstream traction on the back of greater awareness of its potential and enhancements to its platform. The average size of a block had increased to 600K by Jan 2015. The number of transactions using Bitcoin surged, causing a buildup of unconfirmed transactions. The average time to confirm a transaction also moved upwards. Correspondingly, the fee for transaction confirmation also increased, weakening the argument for bitcoin as a competitor to expensive credit card processing systems. (Fees for transactions on bitcoin’s blockchain are specified by users. Miners typically push transactions with higher fees to the front of the queue in order to maximize profits.)

Two solutions were proposed by developers to solve the problem: increase the average block size or exclude certain parts of a transaction to fit more data into the blockchain. The Bitcoin Core team, which is responsible for developing and maintaining the algorithm that powers bitcoin, blocked the proposal to increase block size. Meanwhile, a new coin with flexible block size was created. But the new coin, which was called Bitcoin Unlimited, was hacked and struggled to gain traction, leading to doubts about its viability as a currency for daily transactions.

The first proposal also drew sharp and diverse reactions from the bitcoin community. Mining behemoth Bitmain was hesitant to support Segwit implementation in blocks because it would affect sales for its AsicBoost miner. The machine contained a patented mining technology that offered a “shortcut” for miners to generate hashes for crypto mining using less energy. However, Segwit makes it more expensive to mine Bitcoin using the machine because it makes transaction reordering difficult.

Amidst a war of words and staking out of positions by miners and other stakeholders within the cryptocurrency community, Bitcoin Cash was launched in July 2017. Each Bitcoin holder received an equivalent amount of Bitcoin Cash, thereby multiplying the number of coins in existence. Bitcoin Cash debuted on cryptocurrency exchanges at an impressive price of $900. Major cryptocurrency exchanges, such as Coinbase and Itbit, boycotted Bitcoin Cash and did not list it on their exchanges.

But it received vital support from Bitmain, the world’s biggest cryptocurrency mining platform. This ensured a supply of coins for trading at cryptocurrency exchanges, when Bitcoin Cash was launched. At the height of cryptocurrency mania, Bitcoin Cash’s price skyrocketed to $4,091 in December 2017.

Paradoxically enough, Bitcoin Cash itself underwent a fork slightly more than a year later due to the same reason it split from Bitcoin. In Nov 2018, Bitcoin Cash split into Bitcoin Cash ABC and Bitcoin Cash SV (Satoshi Vision). This time around, the disagreement was due to proposed protocol updates that incorporated the use of smart contracts onto bitcoin’s blockchain and increased the average block size.

Bitcoin Cash ABC uses the original Bitcoin Cash client but has incorporated several changes to its blockchain, such as Canonical Transaction Ordering Route (CTOR) – which rearrange transactions in a block to a specific order.

Bitcoin Cash SV is led by Craig Wright, who claims to be the original Nakamoto. He rejected the use of smart contracts on a platform that was meant for payment transactions. The drama prior to the latest hard fork was similar to the one before forking Bitcoin Cash from Bitcoin in 2017. But the end has been a happy one as more funds have flowed into the cryptocurrency ecosystem due to the forking and the number of coins available to investors has multiplied. Since launching, both cryptocurrencies have garnered respectable valuations at crypto exchanges.