A follower once referred to Bitcoin cash as Bitcoin’s ‘Dumb’ brother. That sounds funny anyway, but it's a perfect representation of the friction between Bitcoin and Bitcoin cash communities. One cut out from the other, these two don’t share a very ‘lovey’ history. According to many, “Roger Ver was a Bitcoin legend until he decided to fork it”. This article itself could get some stern backlashes and it is easy to understand why.
Bitcoin maximalists are hardly (rarely) impressed with anything outside Satoshi’s brainchild, but the spite for Bitcoin cash is on another level. Pretty weird stuff because Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash could serve two different purposes…competently.
As a newbie in the crypto space and before you grasped the concept of blockchain technology, you probably already regarded Bitcoin as the ‘digital gold’. Making cryptocurrencies tradable and integrating them on exchange platforms similar to that of digitized gold sparked off the long-lasting comparison between gold, bitcoin, and cryptocurrencies at large. Bitcoin is at the helm of this comparison.
Bitcoin’s initial purpose was a flexible payment technology; its current orientation designates it as a store of value… principally. The perpetual comparison with gold, firms adding bitcoin to their reserves, values reaching thousands of dollars; bitcoin is simply a better replacement for gold… even the transaction speed suggests.
Bitcoin Blockchain is adapted to perform about seven transactions per second. Working at this speed, transactions could take over ten minutes to be executed and verified on the blockchain. With the Bitcoin lightning network, you can transact faster. Well, the Bitcoin lightning network applies clever tweaks to parse your transactions, and via ‘verified trust’ transactions are confirmed ‘offline’.
Borne out of an infamous turmoil and living through a series of ‘dramas’; Bitcoin Cash, a more flexible fork of the original Bitcoin presents a more sustainable payment solution. Built for merchants; the ‘cash’ suffix says everything you need to know about it. Albeit criticism from Bitcoin Maxis, Bitcoin Cash is ultimately faster than the original Bitcoin and works better for the purpose Bitcoin was initially created.
Say “bitcoin for investors; bitcoin cash for merchants”. Bitcoin should rather spar with gold and lustrous metals, but adopting Bitcoin (in its purest form) for day-to-day financial activities is simply not sustainable. Bitcoin is not scalable and flaunts a rather archaic technology. Bitcoin cash is more developed in these areas and more adapted to suit merchants.
If any ‘bitcoin’ must be used in commerce, it should be cash. You’d have to wait for minutes before the barista confirms your payment and serves you coffee. Relative to most other cases, this is a manageable scenario. Bitcoin causes this, bitcoin cash fixes it. Well; the lightning network does too, you’d argue.
Love bitcoin? Buy Bitcoin cash as well. Or at least, acknowledge its technological advantages. In Contrast to the current situation, bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash complement each other and should grow along. Instead, we are witnessing a case where one is pushed to serve both purposes.
Don’t get it wrong; any store of value can serve as a medium of exchange, including gold. But bitcoin cash fits better into the idea of a ‘cash’. Several other blockchain solutions boast faster and more flexible transaction speed; however, Bitcoin Cash is built on the original Bitcoin framework.