In less than a week on May 15, the Bitcoin Cash (BCH) network will be upgrading the base block size from 8MB to 32MB, as well as re-enabling and adding some OP_Codes to the codebase. With just days left there are a few things BCH holders and full node operators should know before the upgrade takes place this coming Tuesday.
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Just a Few Days Left Until the May 15th Bitcoin Cash Upgrade
The Bitcoin Cash network is about to perform the largest block size increase ever as the upgrade will expand the block size by 4X on May 15, 2018. The development team has also added ‘Satoshi OP_Codes,’ and the fork will also increase the protocol’s default data-carrier-size to 220 bytes. Unless you run a BCH full node implementation there is not much a common user needs to do, except refrain from transacting during the upgrade.
The Hard Fork Activation Will Use the Median Time Past Method
The BCH fork on May 15 will be similar to the fork activations that took place on August 1, and the DAA fork that took place this past November. This means the activation will take place on May 15, but there won’t be specific block height, because the upgrade will activate based on ‘Median Time Past’ (MTP). The initiation of the hard fork will begin on Tuesday, May 15 at 12:00:00 UTC, 2018, but the upgrade will not be implemented until the MTP timestamp and the processing of 11 blocks equal to or greater than 1,526,400,000 takes place. Following this period after the next block, the 32MB upgrade will be live on the BCH network.
