In the letter
- A Florida federal court dismissed a complaint alleging Roger Ver, Jihan Wu and Jesse Powel of market manipulation.
- The case relates to the events in November 2018 during the so-called “Hash Rate Wars” between Bitcoin Cash and the Bitcoin SV network.
A Florida federal court has dismissed an antitrust lawsuit against Bitcoin.com founder Roger Ver and several other prominent figures in the crypto industry accused of market manipulation during a controversial split in the Bitcoin Cash network in November 2018, Law360 reported.
Other defendants in the case included Kraken CEO Jesse Powell, former CEO of Bitmain Technologies Jihan Wu, and Bitcoin Cash developers Shammah Chancellor and Jason Cox.
The lawsuit, first filed by United American Corp (UAC) in December 2018 and amended in March 2020, alleged the defendants had colluded to manipulate the cryptocurrency market in order to favor it Bitcoin Cash Some participants in the network were busy creating a competing clone called it Bitcoin SV.
During the Bitcoin SV hard fork– –An event in which a network splits into two separate chains– –The defendants allegedly “hijacked” the Bitcoin Cash network and “violated all recognized standards and protocols associated with Bitcoin since its inception”.
However, on Wednesday April 1, Judge Chris McAliley of the southern Florida district dismissed the case. According to the ruling, in order to be examined by the court, the complaint must “contain facts and not conclusions that plausibly suggest a conspiracy”.
At least two of the UAC’s two objections are direct allegations that lack substance, the judge said.
Centralize network
Technically, the lawsuit alleged that Ver, Wu, and Bitmain Technologies took 90,000 bitcoin Mining Machines – Antminers that ran on Bitcoin’s original network – and switched them to Bitcoin Cash. This, according to the lawsuit, increased the hashing performance of Ver’s Bitcoin.com mining pool by over 4,000% and effectively centralized the Bitcoin Cash network.
“In the week before the software upgrade, the mining pools of Bitcoin.com and Bitmain Technologies were together awarded 20.1% of the blocks,” the complaint said. “On November 16, 2018, the day after the upgrade, the same mining pools received 98.85% of the blocks on the Bitcoin Cash network.”
In addition, the defendants’ actions allegedly affected the market prices of Bitcoin (BTC), Bitcoin Cash (BCH) and Bitcoin SV (BSV) and pushed the UAC off the network after the Miami-based company sold more than $ 4 million in the network had invested infrastructure.
Kraken cryptocurrency exchange has been accused of initially refusing to list BSV on its platform after posting a public statement stating, “Bitcoin SV does not currently meet Kraken’s listing requirements and is likely to be unsupported.” However, three days after Bitcoin SV split from Bitcoin Cash, BSV was actually listed on Kraken.
However, Judge McAliley stated, “After careful consideration of the complaint, the court concluded that there was a lack of facts to raise any reasonable expectation that the discovery will provide evidence of an illegal settlement.”
Bitcoin Cash – a long and windy road
Bitcoin Cash appeared as the hard fork of the original in August 2017 Bitcoin blockchain After a group of developers, backed by a number of large corporations, mine pool operators, and individual investors, responded to calls to increase the block size from 1MB to 8MB.
Another group of Bitcoin developers and enthusiasts have teamed up behind Segregated Witness (SegWit), a Bitcoin upgrade that aims to increase the block size limit by removing certain data from transactions.
Over time, Bitcoin Cash’s block size has increased from 8 MB to 32 MB. However, disagreements within the project also increased, which ultimately led to another hard fork and the creation of Bitcoin SV (Satoshi’s Vision) in November 2018.
Under the direction of the self-proclaimed Bitcoin developer Craig Wright, BSV was developed as an alternative software to the Bitcoin ABC implementation of Bitcoin Cash. The latter included Roger Ver and Jihan Wu.
Almost three and a half years later, the two projects are living their own lives, and Bitcoin Cash will be hit hard again in November 2020.
Comments are closed.