Some people think Bitcoin Cash a shameless money grab. Others think it’s destined to become the new cash.
Success for #Bitcoincash is not to become the new bitcoin, it is to become the new cash.
— deadalǹ͔͜͡i͎̜͖͗̎͞x̛̳̠̤̥̦̉̊̕̕ (@deadalnix) August 31, 2017
These questions, “What Is Bitcoin Cash” and “Does Bitcoin Cash Have A Future?” originally appeared on Quora, the knowledge sharing network where compelling questions are answered by people with unique insights.
Bitcoin was the first digital currency built on blockchain technology, in which transactions are independently verified by the network without the need of a middleman like a bank.
Bitcoin cash is built on the same blockchain network as bitcoin, but the new software increases the size of the “blocks” that make up the network to allow it to process more information.
Supporters of the newly formed bitcoin cash believe the currency will “breath new life into” the nearly 10-year-old bitcoin by addressing some of the issues facing bitcoin of late, such as slow transaction speeds.
On one side are the so-called core developers. They are in favor of smaller bitcoin blocks, which they say are less vulnerable to hacking. On the other side are the miners, who want to increase the size of blocks to make the network faster and more scalable.
Then bitcoin cash came along. The solution is a fork of the bitcoin system. The new software has all the history of the old platform; however, bitcoin cash blocks have a capacity 8 megabytes.
Investors who have their bitcoin on exchanges or wallets that support the new currency will soon see their holdings double, with one unit in bitcoin cash added for every bitcoin. But that doesn’t mean the value of investors’ holdings will double.
Bitcoin cash has a chance to become the dominant cryptocurrency contingent upon its ability to gain trust and support from both current and new players as well as security of its network.
Sources: Business Insider, BitcoinCash.org
Answered Sept. 4
Bitcoin is, without a doubt, one of the most incredible innovations in the recent past. However, it has also come under a lot of criticism for its scalability issues which has given rise to a lot of debates which are politically as well as ideologically motivated. Finally, on Aug. 1, 2017, bitcoin went through a hard fork which gave birth to Bitcoin Cash.
“Bitcoin Cash is peer-to-peer electronic cash for the Internet. It is fully decentralized, with no central bank and requires no trusted third parties to operate.” Did you notice the emphasis on the words “peer-to-peer electronic cash”?
Answered July 29
Most of the main Bitcoin supporters including the exchanges, wallets, and mining community have shunned BCC and have said they will not be supporting the new blockchain. But ultimately it looks like BCC is a go and BCC will become a new altcoin.If you have your BTC in a hot wallet within an exchange, you are fine to leave it there. But just note that most exchanges are stopping BTC deposits and withdraws starting July 31 to Aug. 2.
But there is a way to profit handsomely from this situation. Since BCC is essentially the same blockchain up to the hard fork block, your BTC wallet’s private key works within BCC. This means that you are getting basically the same amount of BCC as you have in BTC for free. For example, if you have 2 BTC, after the hard fork you will have 2 BTC and 2 BCC.
This said, BTC will continue to have a majority of the market cap and will probably always be worth more. BCH will also probably rise in price over time just as did ETC during the ETC/ETH split even though ETH was always worth more.
Answered Sept. 8
A lot of the other answers are quick to claim victory over the bitcoin fork called bitcoin cash when it only has about 5 weeks of existence.
One must keep in mind that wallets, exchanges, websites and more have all begun to support bitcoin cash. Most importantly, readers must realize that bitcoin cash represents a different form of scaling for bitcoin, that is scaling through a block size increase. There are many in the community who support this form of scaling.
Thus, Bitcoin Cash has a community and a substantial amount of other players (like businesses) in the ecosystem providing support for it. This is a clear sign of it having a strong future.
Answered Aug. 7
Likely. Given how big of a show it just had and how it’s now gaining support from the mining community, it’s probably not going away. That’s not to say that it’s going to be as big as Bitcoin or even a major player, but it will exist in the ecosystem.
Answered July 29
I see BCC as a shameless money grab. I see the ETH fork was an unthinkable corruption of the principle of the immutable block-chain in order to save the DAO project from collapse. (In other words the Ethereum fork was essentially the worlds biggest charge-back).What the history of ETH has taught us is that shameless or unthinkable actions don’t necessarily mean that the new toke has no future.
Therefore we cannot know if BCC will fail or not. All of the arrows point to overwhelming support for the Segwit Changes. Some realtime estimates put the figure as high as 86%.
But does that mean that BCC will eventually die? Not necessarily. As long as people continue to use it then it will have some value.
How about BCC? Some estimates show that as many as 4% of miners may point their mining capacity towards BCC.
If BCC only has 4% of the hash rate and continues to use Sha256 as their proof of work algorithm they they will be exceptionally vulnerable to a 51% attack. That because any malicious actor who controls 4.1% of the Bitcoin hashing power will be in a position to attack the BCC network whenever they like. This means that unless BCC maintains significant hash rate (closer to 50% of the bitcoin hash rate) they will always be vulnerable.
For this reason BCC can only ever be worth a fraction of BTC.
Of course there is a caveat to that statement, and that is if there is a serious exploit found in the Segwit changes then more people may move over to BCC.
Interesting times indeed but I don’t think this will have a major impact on the end users.
At this stage it looks like the overwhelming majority of miners are going to stay with BTC and only a tiny fraction of outliers will move over to BCC. As for everyone else, as long as they control their private keys, nothing stops them from using both.
Read more at Quora, the knowledge sharing network where compelling questions are answered by people with unique insights.
We just finished our August payroll.
About half of our team opted for #BitcoinCash
Average BTC Fee: $8.90
Average BCH Fee: 1.5 cents— Roger Ver (@rogerkver) September 2, 2017
