By this point, if you hold cryptocurrency you’ve probably heard the news or at least read the charts. Bitcoin Cash has been added to Coinbase. This is no small feat. Coinbase is a unicorn. Coinbase is one of the world’s most popular crypto exchanges. I actually googled “most popular crypto exchange,” and guess what showed up? You guessed it. Coinbase.
So what’s the big deal? Exchanges add coins all the time right? Right, but you’ve got to understand, not just any token gets on Coinbase — you gotta be packing some serious trade volume, and even then — it’s only if you’re cool enough (read as: will makes them a considerable profit).
The crypto-enthusiasts community is not what most people would define as mature. Dedicated fans treat crypto similar to how one treats their favorite sports team, allowing markets to be governed often more on emotion and sentiment rather than the merits of the product itself. The internet is the battlefield, and twitter is the sword they fight with, and no two teams have drawn lines in the sand like Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash.
Wait… two Bitcoins? Will the real Bitcoin please stand up? It’s questions like this we encounter on the daily as if people think this is Highlander somehow. Truth is there are more than two, but only one has shown itself to be a real rival. So grab your sword and shield (and twitter handle) as we jump in and explore the difference between these two coins.
A Fundamental Flaw
As we’ve spiraled into the beginnings of mass adoption one thing became very evident — Bitcoin doesn’t scale very well. Being able only to process seven transactions a second It’s slow, painfully so, with transactions taking up to 2 days to occur and recently the fees for the transaction have now gotten so bad that in some situations the cost to withdraw is greater than the withdrawn amount. Admittedly it’s hard to deny that as a transactional medium, BTC is perhaps not the most efficient. This doesn’t mean that it isn’t valuable, but as a usable currency, well maybe not.
A Challenger Approaches
On August 1st, 2017 Bitcoin split itself into two separate chains. This feat is commonly referred to as “hard fork.” While one chain continued to operate as it presently does, the other changed the rules, changing the block size from 1 megabyte to 8 megabytes, operating faster, and with cheaper fees and more. This new chain, known as “Bitcoin Cash,” has had many advocates but none as vocal as Roger Ver. Ver has been so adamant in his distaste for Bitcoin that he’s claimed Bitcoin Cash to be “the true bitcoin,” that BCash was “true to Satoshi’s vision” while Bitcoin had lost its way and was entirely useless. And in the words of Douglas Adams this “was widely regarded as a bad move.”
There can only be one.
Proclaiming your project to be the saviour is seldom a good idea and Roger Ver is not exactly everybody’s favourite evangelist. In fact, if you watch the highlights of one of his interviews, you can see why many people have dug their heels in the sand against Bitcoin Cash.
Some have even made claimed that BCash is more “centralized,” but a harder look reveals that this is not, in fact, the truth.
But regardless of the sentiment towards BCash, Coinbase’s play has created a shift in the power dynamic, making the rival as easily accessible as Bitcoin Core. Will this move render Bitcoin, obsolete? Maybe. Overnight Bitcoin prices plummeted as low as $15,000 while BCash rose to $3,800. Only time will tell, but now more than ever as the masses become frustrated with slow transactions and high fee’s it may be that Bitcoin’s days as top dog — are numbered.
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