What Is The Deal With Bitcoin Cash?
What is the deal with Bitcoin Cash (BCH, BCC, Bcash)?
Heads up: I am heavily biased against BCH so this will not be an objective summary:
If you're primarily trading on Coinbase or new to crypto trading, you may be asking why there are two Bitcoins, and what is this thing called Bitcoin Cash? The answer is purely political, and the short version is, the two major political factions in the BTC community could not agree on how to scale the rate of transactions-per-second (generally known as "making bitcoin cheaper and faster"). One group, representing the largest miners, thinks the fix is simply to increase the number of transactions stored in each block, the virtual objects keeping records secure (from 1mb of data to 8mb). On the other side, the core developers maintain the solution is a series of difficult technology fixes. Ultimately, the two groups agreed to disagree, and the losers made Bitcoin Cash (BCH), removed the code meant to prep bitcoin for the next wave of technology upgrades, and grew the blocksize to 8mb. But make no mistake, the incentive for the miners to create BCH and their own split of the bitcoin blockchain is purely profit. Larger blocks mean more money from transactions, and less competition from weaker miners. My conclusive judgement on this topic is that BCH is in the wrong here. In addition to hijacking the brand simply because they couldn't agree to prematurely increase the blocksize, they are shrugging off current bitcoin limitations and intentionally creating technical debt, pure and simple, and that may ultimately kill it. I think the long play for BCH is extremely weak, and I don't take a strong position in short plays. In the interest of looking somewhat fair to BCH, I do believe eventually BTC will need to increase the blocksize, but only after more effective fixes stop scaling, which should be well in the future. Full disclosure: I do own a small portion of BCH, but own a 20x position in BTC.
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