Bitcoin started from scratch. The Genesis block was mined on January 3rd, 2009 and yes the design was good and there were no duplicates and the followers of Bitcoin became numerous. They used bitcoin to buy pizza, alpaca socks and drugs on the Silk Road and they told their friends to use bitcoin and they emailed eBay asking them to let people pay in bitcoin , and they told their friends to email eBay, and you made long threads about bitcoin on eBay support forum and it was good. There was a team and it was Team Bitcoin.
But Bitcoin soon caught the attention of journalists, governments, Silicon Valley and Wall Street, and the network began to slow down. Team Bitcoin realized that if nothing was done, the network would become unusually slow. Transactions would take days or weeks to process. If users want their transactions to be processed faster, they will have to pay high fees for priority, which makes Bitcoin impractical to use. This started the scalability crisis.
Two factions emerged: the large and the small blockers, each armed with different solutions for the scalability crisis. Everyone hated the idea of splitting Team Bitcoin, but either side believed in their fairness and they wouldn’t give in. On August 1, 2017, the big blockers split. They duplicated the Bitcoin blockchain, the ledger with the history of all transactions, and fathered a subsidiary, Bitcoin Cash. This was known as a “hard fork” and meant that the two currencies would split forever, with Bitcoin Cash transactions recorded in a separate ledger. Everyone who had Bitcoin on August 1st will receive the same amount of Bitcoin Cash.
There was a team and it was Team Bitcoin
This was the start of the Bitcoin Civil War and continues to this day. Warring subreddits. Wikipedia edit wars. The April Fool’s Day joke sent shock waves through the cryptocurrency community with fake announcements that die-hard Bitcoin advocates had endorsed Bitcoin Cash.
At the beginning of April, a moderator at the Deconomy conference in Seoul asked: “Why does there have to be such hostility between Bitcoin and Bitcoin? [Cash]? “Bitcoin Cash attorney Roger Ver replied that the split” rerouted “the project and” that means more babies are dying around the world because they have less economic freedom. “His colleague Samson Mow, a Bitcoin supporter, was more measured and said the hostility stems from the use of the Bitcoin name – but he’s less aloof on Twitter, where his tweets on Bitcoin Cash are full of digs. (Gavin Andresen, who became the lead developer of Bitcoin after the disappearance of Satoshi Nakamoto acted, Mow once called a “poisonous troll.”) A week later, some members of the Bitcoin community cheered when Twitter temporarily suspended the Bitcoin Cash-supporting @Bitcoin Twitter account – possibly due to false reports from Bitcoin supporters.
It’s now been eight months since the blockchain split and there’s no going back. Why do the two sides still devote so much time to insulting each other?
“The arguments have developed over three or four years of bitter debate,” said Andreas Antonopoulos, author of Mastering Bitcoin and Internet of Money. “The principles are real and important to maintain, but much of the drama has nothing to do with principles. Much of this debate now revolves around hurt feelings. It’s about hurt egos. It’s about things that have been said that cannot be left unsaid, insults that have been exchanged, and personalities and ego. “
Antonopoulos has tried to remain neutral in the Bitcoin-Bitcoin-Cash debate for which he has been criticized. “If you don’t take either side, both sides accuse you of not being on their side,” he said. “It is ridiculous.”
“If you don’t take either side, both sides accuse you of not being on their side.”
The only final difference between Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash is a technical one: Bitcoin Cash allows larger blocks or stacks of transactions to be routed over the network, which in theory means more transactions can be processed per second. Bitcoin is also concerned with increasing the volume of transactions, but its solution has been to move some data off the Bitcoin blockchain to keep the blocks on the blockchain small. This theoretically preserves the spirit of the Bitcoin experiment, as small blocks make it cheaper for anyone to run a “node,” which means that the network can be run by a huge collective of small users rather than institutions like banks.
In general, the Bitcoin Cash coalition advocates using their currency as a medium of exchange for trading. “The general saying Bitcoin Cash people like to say is, ‘Will my grandma be able to use it?'” Cory, co-host of The BCH Boys podcast and organizer of the NYC Bitcoin Cash Meetup, using only his asked first name be told me in an email.
In contrast, the Bitcoin coalition is generally friendlier to cryptocurrency investors and cares less about day-to-day payments. “Bitcoin is first and foremost a store of value,” said Michael Moro, CEO of Genesis Trading, which brokers Bitcoin deals for institutions and major investors, in an email. “I don’t think it’s very useful for payments right now for a number of reasons.” He said his company was agnostic to individual coins, but “investor interest in Bitcoin Cash has basically been absent in recent months.”
“When I look at the two coins, on the Bitcoin side, I see this huge focus on price, huge focus on the narrative about the store of value,” said Emin Gün Sirer, Professor at Cornell, co-director of the Cryptocurrency Initiative and contracts as well as a Bitcoin Cash backer. “Store of value” refers to an asset that is not being depreciated.
“When you look at what’s happening to Bitcoin Cash, don’t focus on the price,” Sirer said. “They focus on getting people to use this thing. If you look at the forums etc there is a new message every day. “I converted a small stand on this tiny little island [to accept Bitcoin Cash]. ‘But they do it organically from the ground up. “
There is another reason for the split: Craig Wright
There’s another reason for the split: Craig Wright, an Australian businessman who claimed to be Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin who disappeared in 2011 but was never able to prove it. Wright is an advocate of Bitcoin Cash and parroting the slogan “Bitcoin Cash is Bitcoin”. He has some supporters in the Bitcoin Cash community, although other members of the movement consider him an obligation and would rather not talk about him. Sirer described Wright as “an interesting character with a history of cheating”. “There are cults of personalities in every church,” he said.
It is important to note that the Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash communities are decentralized coalitions. Each side has its proxy, but there are no central bodies or official spokespersons. Some Bitcoin proponents want Bitcoin to be a medium of exchange while Bitcoin Cash has attracted its stake in speculators. There are also users who support both.
The real question that Bitcoin Cash is facing is whether people are actually using it. Bitcoin Cash trades at less than a tenth the price of Bitcoin, and the Bitcoin Cash economy is still tiny compared to Bitcoin. Still, the Bitcoin Cash economy isn’t small. According to Chainalysis, a research firm analyzing the bitcoin blockchain and other cryptocurrencies, $ 230 million worth of bitcoin cash was sent from exchanges in March, a general measure of economic activity, while $ 2.62 billion sent in Bitcoin.
Bitcoin Cash trades at less than a tenth the price of Bitcoin
It is noteworthy that Bitcoin Cash was able to restore much of the Bitcoin infrastructure, including nodes, wallets, and development teams, in such a short period of time. Mike Hearn, a well-known early Bitcoin developer who proposed a Bitcoin Cash-like upgrade in 2014 and vocalized the project after it failed, is skeptical of Bitcoin Cash. Still, he said on Reddit, “The speed with which Bitcoin Cash has restored infrastructure and rebuilt the community is impressive.” Additionally, according to BitPay, which processes transactions in Bitcoin for hundreds of thousands of merchants including Microsoft and Newegg, merchants are eager to use Bitcoin Cash. In December 2017, traders were alerted when the Bitcoin network became overwhelmed with activity and the fee for a single Bitcoin transaction rose. Bitcoin Cash is theoretically resistant to this type of surge due to its higher transaction capacity. BitPay has been offering its customers the option of accepting Bitcoin Cash payments in addition to Bitcoin since the beginning of this year. “Ninety percent of our major dealers have it turned on,” said Sonny Singh, chief commercial officer.
Bitcoin Cash critics like to call the cryptocurrency “Bcash”, “Btrash”, or simply “Fraud”, while Bitcoin Cash proponents insist that its implementation is a purer form of Bitcoin. (A Bitcoin Cash conference held in Tokyo in March was called “Satoshi’s Vision.”) “They have inferior technology and so rely on censorship to stop the advancement of the one real Bitcoin,” tweeted the Bitcoin Cash – Advocate Calvin Ayre.
Antonopoulos finds this kind of argument aggravating.
“The bottom line is that the world is dominated by closed monopoly, state-owned, manipulated, controlling and surveillance-based currencies that pose a fundamental existential threat to democracy and freedom in the world,” he said. “We are at a crossroads and the crossroads are not between Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash.”
A new slogan has emerged, said Antonopoulos: BUIDL, a misspelling of “Build”.
“BUIDL something. Something. Do your part. Write code. Write documentation. I don’t care if it’s Bitcoin Cash or Bitcoin or anything else, it doesn’t matter, ”he said. “You’re getting distracted by all that crap.”
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