The Last Prediction: BCH Wins After the Fork

I’ve been passionate about Bitcoin as money since I learned of it in 2013. Since then, I’ve envisioned it becoming the backbone of our financial system and used in everyday commerce throughout the world. I watched in horror last year when it became unusable as a form of money and I had to entertain the idea that maybe another digital currency would supplant it. It certainly wasn’t going to be money when it could only process 3 transactions per second and required fees of anything more than a penny. Fortunately, there were others that agreed with me, and these people decided to fork away from BTC and continue on with Satoshi’s original design.

When Bitcoin Cash launched, I was quite excited. I believed in Satoshi’s implementation, and so long as it was carried out, I was confident it would win in the end. And by win, I mean it would invalidate the other pointless cryptos by becoming the defacto form of digital money used and accepted across the world.

Ever since the launch of Bitcoin Cash, I thought BCH would overtake BTC. To me, it seems inevitable. Based upon the writings of cryptocurrency’s creator, I believed Bitcoin could, and was meant to scale on-chain. I did not have faith in developers who disagreed and wanted to try to scale Bitcoin by building a highly complicated network on top of it while allowing fees to skyrocket. This was not a winning solution to me, so I fully expected BTC and BCH to swap places at some point.

However, after BCH failed to overtake BTC from the get-go, I realized it would take some time for the market to realize its error. The Bitcoin market was in bull-mode and the miners weren’t going to rock the boat while they were making boatloads of money. For BCH to overtake BTC, it would at least require the bull market to end and a bear market to linger on for some time. BTC would only be vulnerable then. BCH would need this, along with some high-quality progress made within the industry.

Well, I can say with certainty progress has been made, and that Bitcoin Cash is indeed better off than BTC going forward. Bitcoin Cash is just as readily available as BTC, and the innovations and advancements coming from within the industry are superior. The UI/UX of BCH-only wallets is phenomenal, and they make it easy to send money to anybody on your phone. In addition, we’re going to have token and smart contract capabilities soon enough, and the BitDB database is a paradise for developer innovation. Most of all, the MoneyButton makes incorporating Bitcoin (micro)payments into websites easy enough that a newbie developer like myself can do it. (Will be launching a micropayments platform using MoneyButton to bring Bitcoin to the masses in the 1st half of next year)

While BTC continued working on the Lightning Network, the actual-lightning-fast Bitcoin Cash has been working on giving developers tools to innovate and create, while making the user’s experience just as great. Yes, I’m a poet and I know it.

With over a year of progress made, proof that bigger blocks work, and enthusiasm over BTC at a low, the takeover of Bitcoin Cash may be near. So how do I see the events playing out?

To start, I’m going to remind everyone about BTC’s difficulty adjustment and get straight to the point. Lower BTC price ratio to BCH = Lower hashrate = Longer time before blocks are founded (and transactions confirmed) = The longer it takes for the difficulty to adjust.

Should the price of BTC decrease rapidly while the price of Bitcoin Cash increases rapidly, there will be an influx of people trying to use the network in order to swap them out. This will cause the number of transactions to increase dramatically, and since the network can only process 3–4 per second at optimal conditions, a backlog will form. This backlog will be exacerbated because the price of altcoins follow the price of BTC and altcoin holders will see BCH rising while their coin is declining, so they too will want to swap their coins out for BCH. But since every exchange conducts their trades in BTC, the altcoin holders will have to swap them out for BTC first. This means they will be stuck in the queue, adding to BTC’s backlog, left watching their unconfirmed transaction stay unconfirmed for what seems like forever. This will all be compounded by the decrease in hashpower that results from Bitcoin Cash’s profitability increasing, and once BTC’s downwards spiral reaches a certain point, the rest of the miners will wise up and direct their hash to where it actually makes sense to mine. And then, the BTC chain will grind to a halt…

If and when this does play out, we will be far better off. The altcoins that were valued as if they were money will become valueless. The scams and the scammy ICO altcoins will mostly disappear. Bitcoin will have grown up, left its wild teenage years behind, and started a legitimized adulthood life that enables us to improve our financial system, better our world, and bring economic freedom to all. If BTC goes down, it should take down the altcoins and all the insanity with it. It’s not a doomsday scenario, but the start of something better.

That’s what I think will happen, and I think it will happen sooner rather than later. Why? Well, that would be my gut talking, but it’s also because I recently learned the importance of hashpower and what a miner can do with that power. I also realized that SV is going to win the hash battle and that’s largely why my gut is telling me that Bitcoin Cash’s chart may start looking good again.

If there’s one thing for certain in this world, it’s that markets don’t like uncertainty. Well, Satoshi’s Vision gives the market the certainty it wants. A locked-in protocol with a clear path to scale Bitcoin on-chain does just that. Businesses will like this, application developers will like this, miners will like this, and even though you’re an ABC/Amaury fan now (like myself), you’ll like it once you see your asset’s value increase dramatically.

So that’s the why and the how; I just owe you one last when. Even though it’s a fool’s game to make time-based predictions, I’m going to do it anyways since this will be the last time I ever write a prediction-based article as Bitcoin Optimist.

I believe the momentum will continue to build after the fork and reach a boiling point shortly thereafter. Should momentum continue, with hashpower and price moving to BCH, the switch will happen extremely fast. The BTC network will not be able to keep up, and this will cause it to spiral into the abyss, much faster than you would imagine. Thus, my prediction is BCH will overtake BTC within a month or two after the fork. If it goes longer than that, you can consider my prediction a dud, along with the many others I’ve made from the past (all it would take is ABC winning or no subsequent price increases). Time will tell, but you better believe I believe it to be inevitable. That much is certain.

Thanks for reading. Hope you at least found this article entertaining.

Bitcoin Optimist