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Can BCH flip BTC?

Absolutely.

Unplugging no-coiners, altcoiners & BTC coiners is slow & laborious work - but it is permanent. Victory is inevitable, albeit gradual.

At least 99% (more like 99.99%) of the world's population does not conduct daily commerce in any cryptocurrency. Even the vast majority of BTC "adopters" do not earn & spend BTC every day in a circular BTC economy - the vast majority sit their coins in storage and pray that one day something will change and it will somehow become a functional economy. Very little of their ecosystem perceives this as a problem, believing time will somehow inevitably make their nonsensical scaling plans viable. Even at a BTC conference, payments are rarely made in BTC & most interest & development has shifted to competitors. This is one of many problems with BTC.

BCH may be behind at the moment in the race to be global reserve currency, but the contest is still in its early stages. Any cryptocurrency (BTC, BCH, Ethereum or any other) has a long road ahead in terms of technical, social, economic & cultural development before it can universally replace fiat currency as humanity's daily medium of exchange and command a decisive majority of the world's economic activity.

Theoretically, BCH could flippen BTC at any time. No coins needs to move on either chain for market sentiment to decide holders are less willing to sell on-chain BCH than on-chain BTC.

In practice, BCH has to make a convincing case to the market that it is the more valuable form of money - through superior technological innovation, promotion, brand recognition, daily userbase, trade liquidity and so on.

How close (or far) is a Flippening?​

No one can predict the exact date, but progress is continuous & you can help out.

Price charts can be deceptive. BTC's lead is nowhere near as large as it might appear. Consider:

  • Conceptual similarity: Most of the fundamental concepts of Bitcoin are shared between the coins. A 21 million limit, proof of work mining, decentralised community, self custody of funds, how to use a wallet, the problems with fiat currency and so on. All the education & branding & trust built by the much-larger BTC community incidentally benefits the credibility of BCH to almost the same extent. Once someone is convinced Bitcoin is a viable idea and/or knows how to use it - the jump from BTC to BCH is a trivial adjustment. This is one of the critical reasons the BCH community remains defiant with its branding.
  • Shared mining: All of the innovation, investment & work that goes into the BTC mining industry (funded by BTC speculators and users paying high transfer fees) is received by BCH completely for free. As and when BCH price begins to rise, miners can trivially switch their entire operation to BCH in a matter of hours to days by simply downloading a BCH node to use instead of their BTC node.
  • Cryptocurrency industry development: An enormous amount of cryptocurrency industry infrastructure & business occurs in "neutral" services that are not aligned with specific coins. Exchanges, news services, analytics companies, individual influencers & more have all been improving their products & services without a dog in the BTC-BCH dispute. If BCH starts to surge, it will gain increased traction & circulation from those channels without drawing on its own resources.

Furthermore, Bitcoin Cash has a couple of "secret weapon" unique elements which substantially improve its chances of taking the #1 crypto spot from BTC, especially in a relatively short timeframe.

  • Block lead: A completely accidental legacy of the controversial chain split & subsequent improvements to the BCH difficulty adjustment algorithm is BCH now retains roughly a 3 000 block lead over BTC (by block count, not by total proof of work). In general this is a meaningless & arbitrary distinction EXCEPT for the unique factor that fresh BCH coin supply halves (as per the Bitcoin supply schedule) about 20 days (nearly 3 weeks) before the corresponding change in BTC. This opens a regular window every 4 years where the BCH price ratio is expected to rise against BTC & a flippening / death spiral (see below) might start.
  • Awakening BTC adopters: At some point, BTC adopters see through the censorship & propaganda & convert to Bitcoin Cash. It is far easier to fool someone than convince them they have been fooled, but once unplugged it's near impossible to fool them again. Defecting BTC users cause a huge swing, because not only does it weaken BTC by the same amount, it also instantly flips their position on branding and reasons to attack BCH. Even more than that, BTC defectors are by definition already well-embedded into BTC social networks, so the social acceptability of switching (and access to relevant BCH-related information) becomes higher for all their contacts too. This can snowball rapidly.
  • Disenfranchised Bitcoin OGs: Satoshi released Bitcoin with the vision of the entire world using Bitcoin as a peer-to-peer electronic cash and that is what the earliest adopters were passionate about. After the Blocksize War, many supporters of that vision, opposed to the BTC takeover, fragmented into a variety of cryptocurrency projects or left the industry entirely. Many of those early adopters are still passionate about the peer-to-peer electronic cash project and/or rich and/or influential. They remember what Bitcoin used to be like. As BCH builds momentum, those individuals will recognise that it is still the project they once loved, return to the community and once again devote their resources towards it. The Bitcoin Cash Podcast itself is an early example of this phenomenon (see About), but it can be expected that many others will emerge. These early community members, who drove Bitcoin to its initial success, are a very potent collective that should not be underestimated. No other coin has any chance to receive decentralised and voluntary support from a significant majority of these members.

Death spiral: Mechanics of a Flippening​

A Flippening would most likely take place through a rapidly escalating "death spiral". See this segment of The Podcast for an explanation:

Note that a "death" spiral is ONLY possible with BTC being attacked by BCH (or in theory, BSV or XEC). Only coins that share the SHA256 mining can trigger a death spiral & only if BTC is the victim (BCH, BSV & XEC all have the upgraded responsive per-block difficulty adjustment algorithm which pre-empts this situation).

Some cryptocurrency adopters may have heard of "The Flippening" in relation to Ethereum surpassing Bitcoin, but its origin is from the Bitcoin Cash community.

There is even some indicative precedent for a Flippening. After BCH's initial split as a separate chain, it rose to nearly ~~

See also: Hasn't BTC already won?

See also: Is Bitcoin Cash (BCH) the real Bitcoin?

See also: What's wrong with Bitcoin BTC?