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Bitcoin Cash Ranks Third, Industry Leaders Speak Out

Last Updated March 4, 2021 4:58 PM
Rebecca Campbell
Last Updated March 4, 2021 4:58 PM

After the much awaited launch of bitcoin cash yesterday, the alternative digital currency to bitcoin is now ranking third in the crypto market.

According to CoinMarketCap, BCH has a market value of $11.3 billion and is currently trading at $688, up more than 112 percent over the last 24 hours and 77.51 percent over the past seven days.

Its third place position puts it ahead of ripple, which has a market value of just under $7 billion and litecoin, which makes up $2.23 billion.

At 18:41 UTC, yesterday, the first steps were taken by miners when they signalled their movement toward the new roadmap. According to data provided by BlockDozer, the first block was mined by mining firm ViaBTC. Six hours after the event was expected to take place block 478558 marked a clean break and the official start to bitcoin cash.

However, despite a slow start to yesterday’s fork from the bitcoin blockchain, when BCH’s value went down as low as $217, it now appears to be picking up speed.

Many feared, though, that the price of bitcoin would be impacted once bitcoin cash launched. Yet, at the moment, that doesn’t seem to be the case. In fact, bitcoin’s price is appearing to be considerably stable.

At the time of publishing, bitcoin was trading at $2,752 with a 0.22 percent rise over the last 24 hours and a less than 10 percent increase over the past seven days.

Some industry leaders, however, believe that the launch of bitcoin cash is nothing to worry about.

According to Sheffield Clark, CEO of Coinsource, he believes that bitcoin cash is a ‘non-event.’

When we look back 30 days from now, this is essentially going to be a non-event.

Whereas, Perry Woodin, CEO of Node40, a blockchain service provider, specializing in infrastructure hosting and blockchain accounting, said:

People who are going to benefit from Bitcoin Cash are the ones who see it as free money, so they can then invest in something else. It’s going to be a race to see who can sell it the fastest.

Not only that, but support for bitcoin doesn’t seem to be wavering. This can be seen by the fact that 100 percent of the bitcoin mining network supports SegWit, while the SegWit2x proposal has an 88.8 percent support rating.

Solving Bitcoin’s Scaling Issues

The discussion of bitcoin’s scalability issues has been one that has continued for several years. The dispute over how to increase bitcoin’s transaction capacity is what led to the user activated hard fork to create bitcoin cash.

While the situation may be a ‘bit sloppy’ despite some support for bitcoin cash, Rob Viglione, co-founder of ZenCash, thinks that in the end ‘most participants in the ecosystem will be upgrading with the BIP 91 activation for SegWit2x.’

He added, though, that it will be good to see experimentation along two distinct preference clusters.

Rather than forcing one way or another, we can see how each idea unfolds in real life. This is the major advantage of cryptocurrency markets: Instead of bickering over theory and assumptions, we can just bring ideas to market and see how they perform.

One of the main factors behind bitcoin cash was the fact that it could increase the blocksize from one megabyte to eight. Yesterday’s first block showed that it contained 6,985 transactions with a block size of 1.915 megabytes; nearly double what bitcoin can produce.

Yet, while bitcoin cash appears to have garnered some support, others don’t think it will be successful in the long-term.

Ryan Taylor, Dash Core CEO, said that there are several issues that remain.

First, Bitcoin Cash has not solved scaling. It has merely kicked the can down the road with slightly larger blocks, but still lacks a credible technology to scale to massively larger numbers of users. Second, Bitcoin will retain the network of integrated services that make the Bitcoin network useful to businesses and consumers. With no substantial enhancements compared with Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash is unlikely to be integrated into those same services, given the substantial expense for businesses operating them to do so.

Luis Cuende, Aragon co-founder and Project Lead, concluded by saying that a bug will probably take bitcoin cash down.

Probably a fatal bug will crash the whole network (it already happened with Bitcoin Unlimited, Cash’s predecessor) or people will just lose interest in a currency engineered to look decentralized while being totally centralized.

Featured image from Shutterstock.