Why Bitcoin Cash instead of another cryptocurrency?
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For a direct comparison with only BTC, see What's wrong with Bitcoin BTC?
There are more than 10 000 cryptocurrencies today, with more started every day. Why is Bitcoin Cash going to succeed among all of those cryptocurrencies?
Bitcoin Cash and other Bitcoin forks have the following unique advantages vs all other coins:
- Anonymous & inactive founder: Almost no other cryptocurrencies have a completely unknown founder. Almost all coins have a known founder, who will have a large stash of coins in the system and/or a voice of authority in the community. Because Satoshi is completely anonymous and been inactive since 2011, the coin itself cannot be attacked by threatening, influencing, bribing or smearing its founder and its development occurs without anyone being able to say "I founded Bitcoin and I think...". Other coins tend to have either financial or social control vested to a certain degree in their founder. Satoshi also appears to have never spent any of the coins he acquired, removing all possibility of dismissing Bitcoin as a self-interested grift.
- Fair distribution: Today, anyone launching a new coin is besieged by people immediately trying to mine or buy it to get rich, and founders often allocate themselves secret portions before launch. The early days of Bitcoin had no such event, as it was not known that cryptocurrencies would be valuable, and thus it was distributed more fairly and publically initially to those who had a non-monetary interest in it. This is impossible to replicate for any other coin.
- Time: The Lindy effect predicts that the longer something exists, the longer it is likely to continue. Bitcoin was the first launched cryptocurrency, and therefore unless the Bitcoin network stops, it is impossible for any other coin (which were all launched years later) to garner the same trust through reliability across time.
- Brand: "Bitcoin" is the brand synonymous with the general term "cryptocurrencies", just like "Google" and "search engines" or "Kleenex" and "tissues". Coins that did not fork from the original Bitcoin cannot lay claim to this branding, and therefore are perpetually disadvantaged in terms of earning consumer trust.
- Mining network: All Bitcoin forks share the SHA256 hashing algorithm, and thus the billions of dollars in mining infrastructure built around the world. The smaller forks (such as BCH) are constantly able to draw in more of that mining security as they grow, while other coins always have small and less secure mining networks with less vested interests in protecting the coins being mined.
Bitcoin Cash specifically has the following advantages vs all other coins, including other Bitcoin forks:
- Unbreakable community: Bitcoin Cash is the only coin in existence to survive both a "minority" fork (from Bitcoin BTC) and "majority" forks (from Bitcoin Satoshi's Vision BSV and eCash XEC). Most other major coins have had 0 contentious forks, a couple have had 1 (BTC, ETH), no others have had 2 let alone 3. A contentious community fork is a very traumatic event for a cryptocurrency, and only a very dedicated and passionate community will ensure its survival in such an event. The Bitcoin Cash community has fought longer and harder for its survival in more battles than any other coin.
- Decentralised development: Related to the point above, BCH is the only coin where the community have "voted out" the developers programming the protocol (in the BTC & XEC splits) on multiple occassions, when their desire for a usable currency overcame the technical influence and status of high-profile developers. A coin is not decentralised if its development team is a central point of control. BCH and ETC (Ethereum Classic) are the only coins to have ever provably upheld this, and only BCH has done so multiple times.
- Scalability: Unlike other cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin Cash has a realistic plan to be usable by everyone on the planet, while remaining efficient and decentralised. Other coins either cannot reach global scale, or must sacrifice decentralisation, cheap transfer fees and/or direct custody of private keys to do so. The reason Bitcoin Cash has this unique advantage is the original genius design by Satoshi Nakamoto (read his original whitepaper), which other cryptocurrencies and other Bitcoin forks have abandoned.
- Disenfranchised early adopters: 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.
- Controversy: Bitcoin Cash, due to its unique history of preserving the Bitcoin whitepaper design and peer-to-peer commerce ethos in defiance of extreme vilification, is by far the most controversial cryptocurrency ever. No other coin is as loved by its supporters (to persist through so much adversity) or as hated by its detractors (who fear it as a threat, either to their investment in Bitcoin BTC or to existing government currency systems). No other coin, including Bitcoin BTC, has been attacked and decried to the extent that Bitcoin Cash has. Both the fervent passion of its haters to destroy it and its community to protect it are indicators that Bitcoin Cash is a true paradigm shift in the status quo. Also, the Streisand effect generated by its detractors ensures it remains uniquely notorious among a sea of other interchangeable cryptocurrencies.
See also: Nothing is perfect, why NOT Bitcoin Cash?
See also: Should (or will) Bitcoin Cash rebrand?