Today is Bitcoin Cash’s (BCH) one year anniversary. Created exactly 1 year ago on August 1st, 2017 through a fork off of the Bitcoin (BTC) blockchain – it is by no means the only bitcoin fork.
In fact, there are well over 40 Bitcoin forks out there, however, Bitcoin Cash is the first and most dominant of them all based on its current market capitalization of over $13.2 billion, according to data from CryptoCompare.
Compared to BCH, other BTC forks such as Bitcoin Diamond (BCD) and Bitcoin Gold (BTG) have not had nearly as much impact on the cryptocurrency market. On the other hand, Bitcoin Cash has captured the interest of a fairly large number of crypto devotees.
The Roger Ver-backed Bitcoin fork, however, has been accused by many of misleading crypto investors and traders, particularly the newcomers, because it is often promoted or talked about in a way that perhaps intentionally creates confusion between BTC and BCH.
Satoshi’s “True” Vision
Ver, who was an early cryptocurrency adopter and Purse.io investor, has used his Twitter account over the past the year to constantly criticize bitcoin’s slow transaction processing times and other challenges the flagship cryptocurrency has faced since it was created. Meanwhile, he has continuously praised Bitcoin Cash (BCH) and claims it’s “the real bitcoin.”
Many BCH supporters, including Ver and Civic.com CEO Vinny Lingham, argue that BCH has been implemented according to how Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous inventor of Bitcoin, had envisioned it and how he had described it in his whitepaper. Bitcoin cash supporters also claim that BTC’s ongoing development has moved away from how Satoshi had wanted it to be.
Despite this controversial narrative, a recent research report shows that, “there is a declining incentive for miners to secure the minority [Bitcoin Cash] BCH network”, as reported by Crypto Globe on July 24th. Moreover, a number of crypto enthusiasts believe that BCH investors may face huge losses in the foreseeable future.
BCH Network May Be Vulnerable
The main argument, as presented by Dr. Wassim Alsindi, Director of Research at Parallel Industries, as to why Bitcoin Cash may be a vulnerable platform is that there’s currently no reliable protection on the BCH network against bad actors potentially manipulating transactions on its blockchain. Alsindi’s research notes that Bitcoin Cash may be insecure because it did not adopt SegWit.
Instead of incorporating SegWit, the Bitcoin Cash community decided to increase block sizes even more from its previous 8 MB to 32 MB via a hard fork on May 15th, 2018. The reason for increasing block sizes, given by the BCH community, was that it would not only allow for more transactions to be processed per block, but also result in lower transaction fees.
Bigger Block Sizes Not Necessarily Better
But bigger blocks may not necessarily be better, as security experts have noted that cryptocurrency platforms with large blocks require the full-node operators (or validators) to download more data before they can verify transactions. This can become quite challenging and even result in the platform’s blockchain ultimately becoming more insecure.
Moreover, many developers think that the better way to address scalability issues is to create sidechains, which can help to handle a lot of the processing load of the main blockchain on cryptocurrency networks. This is also the direction that the ongoing development and upgrades to the Bitcoin (BTC) blockchain appear to be heading toward.
Only 716 Merchants Accept Bitcoin Cash (BCH)
Getting back to Bitcoin Cash, how does it measure up otherwise in terms of daily transactions per day and rate of adoption? Currently, there are about 20,000 BCH transactions per day, which is up significantly from the 5,000-10,000 daily transactions during the first few months of its existence.
In comparison, there are between 200,000-400,000 daily BTC transactions, which clearly indicates that its usage is much higher than that of BCH. Also, in 2015, it was widely reported that there were over 100,000 merchants who had been accepting Bitcoin (BTC). Given that Bitcoin and the crypto market in general is significantly more prevalent today, the number of merchants accept BTC may be a lot higher.
Meanwhile, Bitcoin.com, a website that has been known to create brand confusion between the flagship cryptocurrency and Bitcoin Cash, claims that more than 10,000 merchants accept BCH.
This appears to be a bit of an exaggeration, however as acceptbitcoin.cash reports that there are only 716 merchants accept Bitcoin Cash.
