When I stepped into the world of cryptocurrency, the fork had already happened. A few members of the community decided to split the Bitcoin chain to make a new one – Bitcoin cash. Many naive and new investors have invested in Bitcoin Cash assuming they are buying ‘cheaper’ Bitcoin. Bitcoin cash was heavily criticised for misleading traders.
Bitcoin Cash is not Bitcoin. The reason I say this has nothing to do with the sentimental values I have. It is simple, if you do not have the support of the community of Bitcoin, you are not Bitcoin, you are an altcoin.
But we are going to talk about the Good and the Bad of Bitcoin Cash. Is it really worth the hype? For this article, we are truly and absolutely going to compare the network and its utilization.
In 2017, some developers decided that Bitcoin block-size should be increased in order to curb the rising transaction fees of Bitcoin transactions. The idea was met with resistance from many other developers. Bitcoin developers also proposed a SegWit implementation as a solution improve transaction capacity. Majority miners in China were unhappy, some early adopters like Roger Ver did not favour the change and pushed forward alternative plans for a split which created Bitcoin Cash.
On August 1, the chain split and everyone who owned Bitcoin now also owned same number of Bitcoin Cash. Bitcoin Cash ticker is BCH/BCC and is also referred to as Bcash sometimes. Bitcoin cash has maximum blocksize of 32MB (3200% more than Bitcoin’s 1 MB) and it has an emergency difficulty adjustment algorithm.
While the real question is whether Bitcoin Cash as a cryptocurrency is good or bad, we must use Bitcoin as a relative comparison for some of our examples.
Are Bitcoin Cash Fees lower than Bitcoin transaction fees. Some days the Bitcoin Transaction fees went to $50 for a transactions, today they cost a cent of the USD. The transactions are fairly cheap. But when compared to Bitcoin Cash, it is expensive.
The website Cryptofees.net, tracks the transaction fees for the both the currencies and you can end up paying a lot more fee for Bitcoin than Bitcoin cash for a micro-transaction. It doesn’t get better with higher amounts, the fees for BCH still remain lower than that for BTC. At the time of this writing the ETH fees are super high, close to 0.75 USD for a transaction.
Verdict: Bitcoin Cash has Cheaper fees than Bitcoin and Ethereum
Are Bitcoin Cash transactions faster? On paper, both the algorithms take 10 minutes to mine a block. So technically speaking, both transactions should take the same time. But in reality, the bitcoin block-size causes a bit of a hurdle when the memory pool becomes too huge to handle. For that reason, having a bigger blocksize can help you keep the mempool unclogged.
So, only if the Bitcoin mempool is full with too many pending transactions, Bitcoin cash become faster and vice versa. But with second layers additions to Bitcoin like the lightning network, it is possible to transfer bitcoin in real time. Bitcoin Cash relies on its 0-conf payments – making sure that all transactions will be accepted in the next block so a merchant can process the payments with zero confirmations.
At the end of the day there are tens of other crypto currencies that can transfer faster than BCH or BTC.
Verdict: Bitcoin Cash’s speed depends on a numerous factors, it cannot be truly deemed faster.
A crypto currency’s price depends a lot on its ease of adoption or the adoption itself. Bitcoin is the first crypto currency and was beginning to be adopted widely to make way for more crypto currencies and even hard forks like Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin Gold and so on.
So where does Bitcoin Cash fair in adoption? BCH is being accepted by quite a few merchants. From travel sites to third parties that fulfill your payments to bigger sites, BCH is being used as a good alternative as a transfer of money.
Bitcoin cash boosts of an ability to have smart contracts. Tools like Flowie and Bitbox allow you to build on the BCH network. Similarly we are seeing companies like HodlHodl building smart contracts on the Bitcoin network, and people playing on https://satoshis.place/ with lightning network.
But Bitcoin cash is far behind in adoption compared to a lot of other crypto currencies in the world. Even when compared to Bitcoin, which is now largely considered a store of value than electronic cash, BCH is far behind.
While Bitcoin is doing over 160k transactions in 24 hours at the time of this writing, BCH is at only 28k. It appears that the community is still not swaying. Moreover, the trading pairs with BCH are very low compared to trading pairs with BTC and ETH.
**Verdict: Change of wind takes time, if BCH continues to deliver the promise of cheap, fast transactions and ability to build on the network, it will be adopted more. **
I personally feel that they are fighting too hard to take Bitcoin down. Bitcoin cash has a bunch of advantages of its own. But the community seems to be more focused on being the ‘true bitcoin’ instead of a good alternative to money.
Roger Ver owns Bitcoin.com. Now imagine a new trader decides to look up Bitcoin. She visits Bitcoin.com and finds herself looking at two versions of Bitcoin namely core and cash. Confusion aside, she goes to a page called Bitcoin Academy and opens the first lesson What is Bitcoin?
The What is Bitcoin page literally says “understand the basics of Bitcoin Cash.”. Now that is propaganda.
Besides this, the continuous dissing of Bitcoin on social media and other platforms is probably a huge factor for people like me or many others to never look at BCH as an investment.
We know Bitcoin isn’t perfect. There are many problems, I can write an entire article about them, but calling Bitcoin Cash the ‘Real Bitcoin’ is incorrect in its own way.
It is the community’s decision to use Bitcoin as an investment or cash. At the end of the day, Bitcoin cash can peacefully co-exist with Bitcoin but they will meet harsh resistance if they try to peddle the ‘BCH is bitcoin’ bandwagon.
I want to end this with a tweet from Cobrabitcoin
By The Way What do you think about Bitcoin Cash ?
Let us know in the comments below :
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