We are seeing the end of Bitcoin. It is done. These are the headlines. Cancelling SegWit2 showed how Bitcoin cannot succeed. Everyone knows this and is dumping it. Bitcoin Cash will take over. Give it another 15 minutes, in fact, and Bitcoin Cash might pass Bitcoin in value. Time to put Bitcoin out to pasture. Like your grandfather, it is too old, too slow, and from another era.
I think about sums up the mantra, don't you?
The only problem, it is woefully incorrect. To start, we heard all this before. I might be exaggerating on the 952 times but there were at least a couple hundred occasions where people legitimately wrote that the end of Bitcoin was near. So far, each time they were wrong. Is this time any different?
The answer is no. Bitcoin is long from dead. If you have not noticed, it seems each time Bitcoin suffers a set back, it only rebounds with greater force. Mark my words, it will do so again.
There are a couple reasons why it is simply foolish to bet against Bitcoin. I will cover them which will show that Bitcoin is going to advance to much higher levels. Some of the absurd claims made by some in terms of pricing might not be so absurd.
A) Bitcoin Cash Is Not The Answer
The main argument for BCH is that it is doing what Bitcoin cannot do, scale up. While some of the actions by BCH are moving in that direction, there is no way they are even close to the levels required to be "money". Scaling up is a legitimate issues for the entire bitcoin sector yet it is naive to think that BCH has the answer.
There is an excellent article written by @cryptoeagle. I freely admit I am not a bits and bytes guy yet he is. In this he summarizes why he feels BCH is not the answer.
Leaving the pump aside, there are technical reasons that he brings up that I feel are too important to ignore. Here is a quote that really hits home:
You can’t possibly scale by ever increasing block size. To do that you would need to store a Blockchain that increases by several petabytes each year and the blocks would become so big you would need super-fast internet connections just to transmit them in time. All of this would only be big enough to accommodate the commercial transactions of a medium sized city like Miami.
For those not in the computer/IT/programming world, I must note that transmission speed is crucial. We see this with investment companies who establish their servers physically closer to exchanges to try and get an edge. Most of us think in seconds and minutes. In this realm, nanoseconds matter. This is one of the reasons wide spread, fully autonomous cars will be a bit slower to implement than many think. The network transmission speeds just are not there yet (most believe 5G will be the solution to this).
There is another interesting aspect to all this. The solution is already here. Did you read that? The scaling solution for Bitcoin already exists, at least according to Bitcoin Unlimited.
Just recently, at the Scaling Bitcoin 2017 event in California, BU’s chief scientist Peter Rizun revealed the results of the “Gigablock Testnet.” Rizun explains the motivation for the project is clear, and BU believes “transaction volume on the bitcoin network could be growing exponentially.” Despite the limit on the number of transactions per block and network fees on the rise, Rizun says the technological solutions to overcome these issues plaguing bitcoin are already here.
They claim they are at 2,000 transactions per second...sustained. You can read the full article:
https://news.bitcoin.com/bitcoin-unlimited-reveals-gigablock-testnet-performance/
B) Wall Street Coming In
It is always best to look at the big elephant in the room. In this realm, it soon will be Wall Street. I wrote that there will be $2T-$3T invested in the cryptocurrency market over the next few years. A great deal of this money will come from Wall Street funds. These individuals are not technical people and they could care less about block size or transmission times. Their main concern is ROI and liquidity while running their risk assessment models.
Anyone who ever was in sales knows that often the path of least resistance is often taken. A Wall Street broker is not going to take the time to learn the difference between Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, and Bitcoin Gold and he/she certainly is not going to try to explain it to the clients. The conversation will revolve around needing to add cryptocurrencies and Bitcoin has the best risk/reward ratio. In this realm, name recognition means a lot. The conversation will not even revolve around the word "cryptocurrency" but, rather, Bitcoin.
Whether BCH is in a pump and dump remains to be seen. It is my opinion that we are just seeing a forking revolution of money. BTC was going to fork, people bought...fork cancelled..people dump. BCH mentions a fork...people buy...once they get their coins...people will dump. Nevertheless, one thing is clear, the uncertainty about Bitcoin caused many developments to be put on hold. Now that there is clarity and SegWit is off, developers can get back to work. The last couple months saw a lot of companies put projects on hold until things settled down. Now, those projects are going to proceed full-steam ahead.
Technology is a wonderful thing and innovations are life changing. That said, even in a technological age, which we are in, finance usurps technology. One can argue the technological merits of BCH until the cows come home. It will not matter. Wall Street is about to enter the room and their money will determine where development takes place. After watching how they operate for 30 years, I can assure you that they are going to pile into BTC in a huge way. It simply is the path of least resistance.
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