After publishing my last article and reading some of the Reddit comments on r/BTC, I decided to write a follow-up to address some of the points raised.
First of all, I agree the article didn’t really explain why anyone should change their mind about supporting BCH, so I will do so here.
Secondly, anyone who thinks I’m Amaury’s “henchman” is free to think so, but I can assure you I am not. I have a great deal of respect for Amaury. I think he’s one of the smartest people I’ve had the pleasure of interacting with. But I also know he isn’t perfect. He’s not the second coming of Christ. He can be frustrating to deal with at times. He can make mistakes. Basically, he’s human. But he’s also an honest human, who’s been right about most things regarding Bitcoin Cash, and I have no reason to distrust him.
Now that I’ve gotten that out of the way, here’s the agenda:
- Why you should bother listening to anything I have to say
- Why I think Bitcoin Cash is doomed
- Why I believe XEC is going to flip BCH
Why you should even bother listening to what I have to say
Because I was around at the start of BCH and had front row seats for its first three years before finally moving on after November 2020. Anyone who has been closely involved in BCH from the early days can attest to this.
While I may not have a technical background, I’d argue there aren’t too many people who were as obsessed with all things BCH as I was from 2017 – 2020. You will find well over 100 articles I wrote on BCH over at read.cash/@cain. Before that I used to write on Honest.cash and Yours.org, both of which are unfortunately no longer around.
I’d argue I used the BCH network more than just about anybody. I literally tried every new app that was launched whether it was memo.cash, lazyfox.io, bch.games, purse.io, and on and on the list goes. You name it, I tried it.
I introduced BCH to countless people in real life. I went to BCH meet-ups, I tipped my barber with BCH, I tried to onboard merchants to BCH and frequented any merchants in my area that accepted BCH as payment. I donated to BCH fundraisers before they were called flipstarters. I watched just about every minute of every BCH related podcast, interview, presentation, and conference.
I did all this because I believed in the BCH mission until the mission no longer seemed to be about spreading economic freedom all over the world, but protesting against people who wanted to get paid for their work.
Ironically, I was never paid for any of this. I was simply passionate about the project and wanted to contribute in any way that I could. And anyone who doubts my authenticity or sincerity just isn’t looking closely enough.
My point is, I’m not just some random bystander who’s been watching from the sidelines. I am someone who was there and watched it all unfold.
Why I think Bitcoin Cash is doomed
I really don’t even know where to start. For one, the project has no roadmap. How do you get from point A to point B without one? The project also lacks any sort of consistency. The people working on it seem to come and go as they please. I remember when the split with Bitcoin ABC happened, there were so many people who banded together to kick Bitcoin ABC off the project. Where are all those people now? Jonathan Toomim, Mark Lundeberg, Asicseer, Jonald Fyookball, Josh Ellithorpe, Fernando Pelliccioni, James Cramer, Bitcoin Unlimited, BCHD, and on and on the list goes. Once they kicked out Bitcoin ABC they seemed to have abandoned BCH. Because all they were interested in was tearing someone else down rather than buliding something of their own.
Unlike the regular bi-weekly releases put out by ABC, the BCH client releases are haphazard at best. A quick comparison of the number of commits by Bitcoin ABC and all the BCH clients put together will reveal to you who is working hard, and who is hardly working.
Then of course there’s Roger. Shortly after the split, Bitcoin.com all but abandoned BCH. Even their own Verse token was set to launch on ETH, not BCH, or even smartBCH. After creating a lot of drama over the chained transaction limit, what did that result in other than creating more division within the community? This latest incident regarding Coinflex is nothing new for Roger. Just off the top of my head I’ve watched him lie about the $200M BCH investment fund, about signing his name on the original IFP proposal, about funding Bitcoin ABC, and even taking credit for donations that were given by community members such as myself. Meanwhile, the BCH community seems to want to ignore all these red flags for some reason. In many ways, it reminds me of how the BSV community is willing to turn a blind eye towards Craig Wright and his behavior.
Kimdotcom is not saving BCH. Even if he does finally launch k.im, I doubt it will have any kind of impact. As someone who was arguably the most prolific writer on every single BCH blogging platform that ever existed, I would know.
SmartBCH was supposed to save the project but all it ended up doing was create more headaches. What’s General Protocols done? Where’s that BCH documentary that was funded? What am I missing?
Honestly, I see no potential catalysts for Bitcoin Cash whatsoever. You can have your meet-ups, you can try and add every small business on the planet, but it still won’t save the coin. Why would a merchant bother accepting BCH when he realizes it doesn’t bring any new customers?
Bitcoin Cash had every advantage. It was listed on all the major exchanges, Bitpay, Purse.io, Grayscale, and on and on, but it hasn’t helped. The question is why? If BCH is such a superior technology, why has it gone from once being over 40% of the market cap of BTC all the way down to 0.5%?
They say insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different outcome. All I’ve seen out of the BCH camp are the same tired narratives I’ve heard since five years ago, only now they can’t blame their failures on a French dude and his supporters.
Why I believe eCash is going to flip BCH
So if BCH is a dead end, where does that leave you if you still believe in the promise of peer-to-peer electronic cash? Do you go to Dash? Zcash? Monero? Bitcoin? Ethereum?
That’s for you to decide, but here’s why I chose eCash.
I appreciate the fact that it’s a continuation of Satoshi’s original Bitcoin project. As such, it launched with the same fair distribution, the same UTXO model, the same limited supply and emission schedule. If you liked BCH for these reasons, XEC has all that and more.
Now I know many BCH supporters are concerned about the differences between XEC and BCH. The biggest one being the new coinbase rule that allocates 8% of the block reward to pay for development by Bitcoin ABC. Does it lead to some centralization? Yes, in terms of the development, but as long as enough people are mining the chain and running nodes, I see no reason why eCash wouldn’t maintain its censorship resistance. Imagine if you dismissed Bitcoin when it first launched because all the development was being done by some anon named Satoshi Nakamoto. Also, if you had no problem trusting Coinflex to handle the smartBCH bridge in a centralized way, you can’t say anything because that was clearly a much worse central point of failure.
The other big concern is regarding Avalanche and how it will be implemented. People are worried that proof of work will be replaced by proof of stake, but that’s not true in the slightest. The purpose of Avalanche is to enhance proof of work, not replace it. Avalanche nodes will have no way of producing blocks, only validating them, so miners will always be a necessary part of eCash.
As for the fact that it’s taken much longer than expected for Avalanche to be implemented, all I can say is that it doesn’t mean work isn’t being done. Anyone who cares to look will see that the engineers of ABC are working hard to solve difficult problems that no one has ever tackled before. While waiting for it to be completed isn’t easy, I believe it will be worth the wait because once its finished eCash will be one of the most technologically advanced blockchains in the world with 51% attack prevention, instant transaction finality, real time transaction processing, and much more. If that sounds exciting to you, you can follow the progress here and here.
Finally, another criticism I often hear is that eCash isn’t listed on any US exchanges. It’s also not on Trust wallet, or Bitpay, or Grayscale. While that’s certainly not anything to cheer about, I also believe it’s an opportunity. Given XEC is already almost 40% of the market cap of BCH, having risen from as low as 2.7% a little more than a year ago, I can only imagine what will happen when Avalanche goes live, or if one of the big US exchanges finally lists it, or if Trust wallet, Bitpay, or Grayscale announce they are adding eCash to their platforms.
As I’ve said a million times before, I obviously can’t see the future. I don’t know how the market is going to behave a week from now, let alone a year from now. I’m also the first person to admit that my knowledge is limited when it comes to other cryptocurrency projects. Whether it’s Avax, or Solana, or Near, I’m not educated enough about those projects to say anything about them with confidence. But I am confident about my knowledge of BCH and XEC, and the two projects couldn’t be more different in terms of their trajectories.
Unlike BCH, XEC does have a roadmap, one that is well thought out and makes sense even to a layman like me. XEC has leaders who have given me no reason to stop trusting them. While BCH was given every advantage other than the BTC ticker, XEC has had to earn everything it’s achieved to this point. It’s fought tooth and nail to go from complete obscurity to just outside the top 50 on coinmarketcap.com.
While some of you see the new coinbase rule as a tax, I see it as an insurance policy that allows ABC to continue building in both bull and bear markets alike. It provides a steady revenue stream that can be counted upon to fund development and infrastructure.
It’s true there’s still a long road ahead, but I’m excited by all the progress I’ve seen up to this point and all the progress to come. Like the fact that they’re integrating the new Chronik indexer directly into the ABC client. I’m looking forward to the new blockchain explorer that was funded by the GNC, as well as the new Paybutton project that will help attract more builders and app developers.
The eCash project is also something that lives by the open source ethos. Everything is open source and available to the public. On the other hand, the most popular wallet for Bitcoin Cash is closed source.
To me, smartBCH was just the latest rugpull in a long line of rugpulls for BCH. Think of all the developers who dedicated their time and resources to develop on the chain only to have the infrastructure they relied on get totally abandoned by the community. Whether it’s the rest.bitcoin.com API, or the SLP infrastructure, or the badger wallet extension, all I’ve ever seen with Bitcoin Cash is a lot of hype and no follow through. That’s not how the eCash project operates.
If you disagree with anything I’ve said, or if anything I said is untrue, feel free to let me know, because like I said in my last article I think one of the most beautiful things about being a human being is having the ability to change our minds, as well as having the freedom to try and change the mind of someone else. No matter what happens, I wish you the best of luck, and I hope you choose wisely.