[2017-11-13] Bitcoin Cash Pump Stalls, Stabilizes Near $1500

[ivanpoldark]

The Bitcoin marketplace has become a sort of chaotic mess, as the hardfork altcoin Bitcoin Cash (BCH) has surged. Many pundits have embraced the new altcoin as a way to honor the original Bitcoin vision of Satoshi Nakamoto. In contrast to the original BTC, BCH offers 8MB block sizes and faster transaction times.

As the new NYA-proposed SegWit2X hard fork has been put to an untimely end, the Bitcoin community expected stability and increasing prices. However, quite the opposite happened for Bitcoin as the price has sustained a substantial decline over the past couple of days.

As Bitcoin rapidly dropped in value, BCH has responded in the opposite way, pulling investors and consumers away from the original core chain, moving large amounts of volume into the BCH camp, and producing . So intense was the price shift, that even Vitalik Buterin publicly congratulated the chain’s growth.

Bitcoin Cash or Bitcoin Core?

Bitcoin Cash has continued to surprise the majority of BTC holders. The price has moved in huge swings, often as much as $500 in a matter of a few hours. As volatility increases and the market continues to correct and swing, prices will continue to move back and forth between the two contentious forks. Both have their followers, and the winning coin will have a sizable following after the dust settles.

However, among many industry insiders the results of the contention are not critical. Regardless of which fork succeeds, the general goal among cryptocurrency advocates is that support will continue to grow in the general marketplace. David Sønstebø Founder and Chairman of IOTA said: 

    "The entire Bitcoin/Bitcoin Cash drama and fork fiasco highlights just how stagnant Bitcoin is both as a technology and community, as well as how the centralized miners have the ability to manipulate the market at a whim. Furthermore it really shows the inherent limitations of Blockchain architecture. No matter which route the quorum decides to go in, it will have a negligible effect on Bitcoin's adoption as a transactional settlement layer.”

https://cointelegraph.com/news/bitcoin-cash-pump-stalls-stabilizes-near-1500

[Carlton Banks]

In contrast to the original BTC, BCH offers 8MB block sizes and faster transaction times.

No.

Bitcoin Cash can be either very very fast, or very very slow. This is because of the way they changed the difficulty adjustment from Satoshi's design; sometimes there are more than 12 BCH blocks per hour, sometimes there are as few as 2 or 3 per hour (Satoshi's difficulty scheme is less dynamic, where 6-7 blocks per hour is the historic norm)


Bitcoin Cash proponents may like to make a big thing out of how there's a hard fork on the BCH blockchain this week to change it back to Satoshi's difficulty scheme. But all that will change then is that Bitcoin Cash will simply be the same speed as Bitcoin, 6 blocks per hour

Both have their followers, and the winning coin will have a sizable following after the dust settles.

Riiiiight

So, this is a deceptive way of presenting the situation. If either coin is going to "win", then when did the competition start? And does the competition only end when the BCH price is $0.01 above the BTC price? Oh please

[SirWilliam]

Ahahaa, stable near $1500?

Down, down, down she goes....

[Proton2233]

Ahahaa, stable near $1500?

Down, down, down she goes....

I don't trust bch. I do not invest money in it, and therefore do not follow the changes in the price of these altcoins. I think I heard somewhere that BCH rolled back by 20%. Is that stabilization? I think that people just don't want to admit that they lost money as a result of this speculation. How can you compare any altcoins with bitcoin.

[Variogam]

In contrast to the original BTC, BCH offers 8MB block sizes and faster transaction times.

But all that will change then is that Bitcoin Cash will simply be the same speed as Bitcoin, 6 blocks per hour

You talking like confirmed Bitcoin transactions taking average about 10 minutes. It is not true, and with last year or so of reoccuring Bitcoin congestion it takes much longer than that. At least Bitcoin Cash higher transaction capacity making it like Bitcoin early years, which really means faster average confirmation transaction times for Bitcoin Cash.

I found both Bitcoins usefull though, Bitcoin as speculative investment only and Bitcoin Cash for actual usage. Having both Bitcoins is important to fill every use case.

[xPPx]

Classic pump/dump. I only rep that Bitcoin. Kinda pissed I sold BCH at $300, though. I will HODL BTG. I don't care for it, but you never know...🤑

[Carlton Banks]

In contrast to the original BTC, BCH offers 8MB block sizes and faster transaction times.

But all that will change then is that Bitcoin Cash will simply be the same speed as Bitcoin, 6 blocks per hour

You talking like confirmed Bitcoin transactions taking average about 10 minutes. It is not true, and with last year or so of reoccuring Bitcoin congestion it takes much longer than that.

You're getting 2 different things confused.


Bitcoin still has a 10 minute block target. That didn't change in the last year.

What has changed is the transaction volumes. And if you don't want to pay higher fees, your transaction won't get into a block (i.e. won't get sent) until a miner thinks that your fee is worth it. This can be handled with Fee Replacement option (which let's you bump up the fee of your transaction so it doesn't get ignored by miners)


Bitcoin Cash doesn't really solve the problem so well. If BCash was really successful, with everyone using it, the blocks would be so big that people would switch to a less demanding cryptocurrency (Bitcoin Cash has the biggest blocks of all the cryptocurrencies, 8MB max right now, but less than 1MB of that is actually used because no-one really uses Bitcoin Cash).

[TraderTimm]

For the people seriously considering BCrash as an alternative -- don't be misled and uninformed.

There are many reasons why BTC will remain the gold standard and not BCrash.

BTC Advantages over BCrash:

    A deep pool of very talented set of developers who have deep knowledge in the critical technologies that underpin Bitcoin: cryptography, peer-to-peer communication, game theory, protocol development, and very importantly, security
   
   An unparalleled track record for releasing well-tested and secure code (the recent Parity-eth scandal shows just how bad even one small bug can be)
   
   Has an ethos that tries to minimize centralization pressures of all kinds, mining, client, and providers. This includes trying to ensure upgrades are backwards compatible. For people who use alternate implementations of Bitcoin other than Bitcoin Core, or who customize the client, this is critical. One small example: Greg Maxwell noted that users and alternate clients "may have their own lengthy patching and qualification process". When those aren't taken into account, "forced upgrades erode decentralization and privileges hosted wallets/apis/pools over running your own infrastructure"
   
    BTC has a censorship resistance ethos that is critical to ensuring that no one party controls the coin (one of the key attributes that makes Bitcoin special). Even the CEO of Xapo, who was a Segwit2X signer recently acknowledged he got a bit too eager with his support of a fork and that censorship resistance is critical.
   
   Has a large ecosystem working on scaling solutions. Some on-chain (like segwit, MAST), and others on the way that may also improve privacy such as Schnorr. Many competing groups are also working on second layer solutions like lightning or drivechains/sidechains. Just this week there was a new whitepaper on more ways to do funding of micropayment channels that might make lightning even better. There is an incredible amount of spectacular science and research going on here
   
   Has a deep, thriving ecosystem of developers, wallets, companies, and users committed to it's success and development
   
   A wide deployment of different clients, libraries, and supporting systems
   
   Makes it a bit harder to skip proof of work in a covert way with ASICBoost
   
   Significant performance improvements and rapid ongoing development and research
   
   Strong network effects
   
   BTC transaction volume, people actually using the coin is literally 25X times higher than BCH! The little volume in BCH is most likely speculative since virtually no one accepts it.

BCrash has:

    Heavy influence from one mining group that pushed for it and most likely funded it. This is the same mining group that held back segwit (a scaling upgrade, security improvement, and bugfix for malleability). This was done against the wishes of nearly every Bitcoin engineer (even former engineer Gavin Andresen supported Segwit)
   
    Only 1 full-time developer, Amaury Sechet (deadalnix). When someone asked him at a recent conference to list other people who work on it, his only response was "freetrader". That doesn't exactly inspire confidence since the entire foundation of Bitcoin is the code.
   
    Almost no track record yet for releases or security
   
    Potential scaling problems: If blocks started to actually fill up many users would not be able to run a full node because the costs of bandwidth and also storage would become problematic since bandwidth requirements increase at a much faster rate than the block size. This would make those users subject to people or large organizations who want to manipulate the coin since only large players and miners may be able to run full nodes as the costs rise.
   
    An ideology that favors putting the costs onto full nodes despite no compensation; economists call this "cost externalization" and can lead to a break-down of the incentives known as "tragedy of the commons"
   
    No track record on how disputes between developers are resolved or when something is production ready, no diverse set of developer testing
   
    A fledgling set of clients and apps, almost nothing compared to BTC
   
    A distribution schedule that means faster inflation and more coins, and also, a far lower period of time before new coin creation comes to a halt entirely. This combined with the idea of trying to keep transaction fees to a minimum means the future security and viability of the coin is much less certain than BTC
   
    A likely exploitation by miners of covert ASICBoost, skipping some proof of work but only for privileged miners covered by a patent
   
    Lack of acceptance in the marketplace. Some exchanges support it, but it lacks the critical mass of retailers and people that accept it (the network effects of existing BTC works against this coin)
   
    Low transaction volume (roughly 80 transactions per second compared to Bitcoin's 2150 per second.
   
    High likelihood of a price crash once some exchanges like Coinbase/GDAX free up coins and users can sell them

[greeklogos]

People pay so much attention because of in the name there is word "Bitcoin" but this crypto has nothing together with Bitcoin indeed. Anyway it's a big success for this newbie, maybe Bitcoin Gokd will follow this path as well one day.

[buwaytress]

If any of these people making the comparisons here actually used Bitcoin Cash since its inception, they'd have experienced how slow it's taken at periods to find blocks. In fact, for every so-called advantage they've measured, not a single one would stand in the same performance as Bitcoin were BCH to undergo the same conditions: tx volume, tx frequency, attacks etc. Apply the stresses of Bitcoin to BCH and they'd see exactly how wrong they are about BCH superiority.

And they'll never get to experience it either, because BCH is still not used by merchants, still not accepted as normal payments for the normal user. Heck, still can't even cash it out easily without converting to... Bitcoin.

So, this is a deceptive way of presenting the situation. If either coin is going to "win", then when did the competition start? And does the competition only end when the BCH price is $0.01 above the BTC price? Oh please

Exactly. They're running in their own race, with everything to prove... it may be that Bitcoin is better off with the existence of other crypto, but Bitcoin's never had anything to prove.