Can Bitcoin Cash survive? Is it the Ethereum Classic of Bitcoin? Will its price increase in the future? Today I'll be going over the community, pricing, network health, and acceptance of Bitcoin Cash and compare it to those of Bitcoin. I will not be analyzing lines candlesticks and speculating on the price. So let's kick things off.
Bitcoin Cash (BCH, BCC or XBC) is a 1:1 fork of Bitcoin. It's main differences are that it doesn't run Segregated Witness and the block size is 8MB. Although it was originally developed by Bitmain as part of a UASF contingency plan, UASF never happened. Instead, independent developers in the Bitcoin community picked it up. Block 478558 was the last common block, with block 478559 being the first Bitcoin Cash block..
Bitcoin Cash is intended to scale on-chain only, without seeking second-layer solutions.
Nearly everyone who advocates on-chain scaling is a supporter of Bitcoin Cash, claiming that it falls in line with Satoshi's vision in the whitepaper. The community is nowhere near as large as that of Bitcoin, which is expected.
At the time of this post, there are 740 Bitcoin Cash nodes, whereas Bitcoin Core has 5600. [Source] The exact numbers are inaccurate because not all nodes have open ports, but these are the proportions.
In addition, the Bitcoin Core subreddit (/r/Bitcoin) has substantially more frequent posts than /r/btc, which is unofficially a big blocker hub, and /r/BitcoinABC, which is the Bitcoin Cash subreddit. Obviously this isn't any accurate measure of the community, but I'm stating it anyway.
The majority of people who don't fully understand what Bitcoin Cash represents don't want to learn and treat Bitcoin Cash as an airdrop. Moreover, in order to understand it, people also need to understand the scaling debate which may be difficult for some.
However, the people who support Bitcoin Cash understand the scaling debate and truly believe in this coin.
If you tried to make a Bitcoin Cash transaction a few days ago, you must have noticed the painfully long amount of time it took to go through. That's because the hashrate was too low and the difficulty was too high. Block time was sky high.
To combat this issue, an algorithm that reduced difficulty was implemented. I will not explain how it works in detail, you can read about it here. Block time isn't quite Bitcoin's 10 minutes yet, but it's going to be so on the next difficulty readjustment. Overall transactions are relatively fast and the network is now usable.
Should Bitcoin Cash see increased adoption, the blockchain will become bigger at a faster pace than that of Bitcoins, which will implement the Lightning Network. This means that the number of nodes, which is already quite small, could decrease substantially, thus making Bitcoin Cash less trustless and more centralized. Proponents of big blocks say that this shouldn't be an issue as storage space is very cheap and is getting cheaper.
Bitcoin Cash hit it's ATH of $727 on August 2nd. This was a day after the fork and the price was significantly inflated due to exchanges not allowing deposits and withdrawals. Basically you could only trade them if you already had Bitcoin stored on an exchange prior to the fork. Since then, the price has significantly declined and it's now at $300.
Most people are highly pessimistic because it doesn't currently have any real-world advantages over Bitcoin. Instead, it claims that it will be faster/scale better in the future.
At no point since release was Bitcoin Cash more profitable than Bitcoin to mine, despite the difficulty adjustments.
You can't purchase anything with Bitcoin Cash and you're most likely not going to be able to in the future. Merchants will rarely choose to accept any altcoins. Bitcoin is already confusing to understand and Bitcoin Cash, due to its name, may worsen the situation or cause headaches.
Fortunately, it has the support of many exchanges and services. More so than the majority of other altcoins out there, which is a great thing.
The entirety of this post may seem like criticism about Bitcoin Cash. It truly isn't. It has only been 10 days and there are issues as expected, but things are getting better.
However, Bitcoin Cash is not Bitcoin. It has a strong following and will survive, but it will not see the adoption of Bitcoin. The majority of the overall Bitcoin community does not want it. In that sense, it's an Ethereum Classic.
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While you're at it, check out this post on post-SegWit Bitcoin.
