Bitcoin Cash - Will it Survive? - Objective Analysis & Future Prospects
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.
What is Bitcoin Cash?
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.
Community and Reputation
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.
Network Health
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.
Pricing & Mining Profitability
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.
Acceptance
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.
Conclusion
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.
Follow me for more thoughtful and objective posts on cryptocurrency and technology like this. Make sure to upvote and resteem this post if you liked it.
While you're at it, check out this post on post-SegWit Bitcoin.
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I agree with almost everything you say. There is one argument however that I dont understand. You say:
"What's concerning is the amount of nodes that will be running with an 8MB block size after a while. The blockchain will become substantially bigger than Bitcoin's. Proponents of Bitcoin Cash and big blocks claim this is not an issue because storage space is cheap."
Currently the blocks created on the BCC chain are much smaller than the blocks created on the BTC chain. The block are all well below 1MB because the number of transactions is relatively low. The BTC chain is now growing much faster than the BCC chain. It seems to me that the number of nodes supporting BCC is indeed a concern but not because the size of the blockchain is too big.
You're right. It's definitely not a concern right now, but it could be in the future if it gets more transactions. This will largely depend on its development and how things unfold with SegWit2X, as well as general future cryptocurrency adoption overall. Ultimately, the blockchain size of BCC should exceed that of BTC, which will implement the Lightning Network.
I will edit that statement, thanks!
I guess BTC first has to run into a filled up Mempool again before BCC can proof what it's worth. Anyway, I consider it too soon to get rid of the free BCC acquired. Just let it run and see where it ends up.
Maybe. But the only reason BTCs mempool was 'full' a couple of months ago was due to spam attacks, which stopped completely with the NYA. It'll be very difficult for the network to be congested again after SegWit and LN, but we'll see.
Great post! This answered a follow-up question to my other comment response.
Thank you!