For most crypto enthusiasts, there’s rarely a middle ground when asked about Bitcoin Cash. They either love it, or they hate it.
Those who hate it will find as many reasons as they can to do so, and those who love it will find any reason to defend it against any reasonable argument.
On Monday a Twitter user WhalePanda alleges that the Bitcoin Cash team created a new website for its wiki that rips off of the Bitcoin wiki. A quick look at the two shows that they are identical, except for the fact that some words were changed with «Bitcoin Cash».
The wiki itself appears to have been copied and pasted almost line-by-line from Bitcoin’s original wiki. The new wiki was created on Saturday.
But there are a few things that indicate that this isn’t Bitcoin Cash’s team ripping off Bitcoin. First, we can look at the WHOIS data for both «developer.cash» (the alleged rip-off’s site) and «bitcoincash.org» (the official site for Bitcoin Cash).
They were registered with two different registrars: NameCheap and GoDaddy. Teams don’t usually use two different registrars for two different sites because it often leads to administrative complications.
Believing that Bitcoin Cash’s team ripped off Bitcoin’s wiki and pasted it as their own would require ignoring this detail. However, it is entirely possible that the team developing BCH’s software and maintaining its official site decided to use another provider for the wiki.
Then we can look at «bitcoincash.org», there is absolutely no reference to the wiki on the site. There is no announcement from their official Facebook page, either.
While this still doesn’t prove that Bitcoin Cash didn’t rip off Bitcoin’s wiki, it presents a compelling argument that this might have been an elaborate prank of sorts, especially considering how prominent Bitcoin Cash has become recently.
It is worth noting that even if the team did rip it off, Bitcoin’s wiki is on a Creative Commons 3.0 license, what means that anyone could reproduce it with modification even for commercial purposes.
