The Bitcoin Cash (BCH) blockchain has split and many supporters are ready to move on, as the hash war is said to be over because the Bitcoin SV developers have revealed that they will add replay protection. But with all the focus on the emergence of a new chain, many people haven’t even noticed that the BCH software has been upgraded.
For instance, new protocol changes have been applied to the blockchain, including a clean stack for more efficient script evaluation, canonical transaction ordering (CTOR), an enforced minimum transaction size, push-only for scriptsig, and the addition of the opcode OP_Checkdatasig.
The two recent fork additions, OP_Checkdatasig and CTOR, have been the topic of intense discussion over the past few weeks. With CTOR, transactions within a block are sorted differently, while removing the limits of topological transaction ordering (TTOR). Developers believe CTOR removes a lot of the complexity of block template creation time. When coupled with the Graphene protocol, the chain could see a more efficient method of broadcasting blocks as well.
BCH developer and cryptocurrency miner Jonathan Toomin has published a comprehensive description of CTOR, while blockchain researcher Joannes Vermorel has also written about the protocol in great detail. And Bitcoincash.org explains that Bitcoin ABC developers believe CTOR “will have huge payoffs for the future of Bitcoin Cash.”