Bitcoin Cash Fork Leaves Users Behind, But Does It Matter?

In the process - executing at block 530350 - a portion of the bitcoin cash community was left behind.

At the time of writing, between 16 percent and 17 percent of bitcoin cash nodes are running old software and because of the way upgrading by hard fork works, those nodes are now running on a completely separate network.

If any user running one of those nodes were to make a transaction, the new, larger bitcoin cash network would not recognize it.

Critics of bitcoin cash argue it's a bad sign that so many nodes haven't upgraded, since those users are now completely cut off from the rest of the network.

Some have even gone as far as to argue the quietness around the hard fork as a sign that relatively few people care about bitcoin cash.

"The network update has the full support of the community, with bitcoin cash aiming to compete with the [lightning] network of bitcoin," said Matthew Newton, an analyst at crypto investment platform eToro, in a statement.

Because of the bigger block size, users can now write longer messages on the bitcoin cash social media site Memo.cash.

The hard fork that led to bitcoin cash was a controversial one and even though the two groups have went their separate ways, there is still arguments over the groups use of language and marketing.

Further, many critics argue the upgrades in the latest bitcoin cash hard fork don't have good trade-offs for the system as a whole.

"What events like these are also making clear is the underlying sense of competition between the bitcoin cash and bitcoin communities," Newton said.