Segregated Witness has officially locked-in and bitcoin's price is currently coasting along at $3430. Even though Bitcoin market prices have rallied to new all time highs after the August 1 hard fork, both Bitcoin and the newly formed network, Bitcoin Cash still have some uncertain futures ahead.

The hard fork happened, and the Bitcoin network split into two different blockchains that share a previous history. The Bitcoin Cash (BCH) network has survived an entire week, with five mining pools dedicating hashpower towards this alternative chain. Currently, the Bitcoin blockchain is still 899 blocks ahead of the new BCH chain, and it's also 54 percent more profitable to mine BTC than BCH. However, this will change on August 8 as Bitcoin's difficulty is going to increase approx. 7 percent while the BCH chain has been lowered to 17 percent of BTC's current difficulty.

At the moment there have been 240 BCH blocks mined since the blockchain split and an 'unknown miner' has processed more than 83 percent of all the blocks in existence. So far there have been a total of 16 'big blocks' (over 1MB) found on the BCH network with a few large ones being over 4MB. The other mining pools which are dedicating hashpower to the BCH chain include Suprnova, pool.Bitcoin.com, Viabtc, and the Bitclub. These four pools have only found 16 percent of the 240 BCH blocks mined. At press time the BCH chain is processing blocks consistently at a rate of 30-60 minutes per block with some longer intervals here and there.

Bitcoin Cash Markets

The price of Bitcoin Cash has helped mining profitability quite a bit as the price per BCH is roughly $380 at the time of writing. BCH markets dropped to an all-time low of just under $200 per BCH, but on August 6 the price rebounded during the day. Currently, BCH markets are up over 40 percent in the last 24-hours with a market capitalization of over $6.2B. Bitcoin Cash also has the third highest trading volume processing $394M over the past 24-hours. Both BTC and BCH prices started ascending on August 7 and Bitcoin hit an all time high of $3490 during the overnight.

Bitcoin Cash (BCH) prices have rebounded touching $380 on August 8, 2017.