We all know who is the big daddy in crypto and that's ofcourse Bitcoin original core. Since alot of people are femiliar with it but they are not femiliar with Bitcoin cash i would like to compare them both and what kind of impact they have on average Joe.
Bitcoin has exploded in 2017 and alot of people are saying that it is a scam, or a ponzi or that it is undervalued. Bitcoin is definitely not a scam, i'd say it is an experiment which has potencial to revolutionise how our financial system works, but it has a technological barrier. Surely his apreciation in 2017 is astonashing but in this post i don't want to speak about price spikes or trends that will come in near future, i'd like to take a closer look into fundamentals of Bitcoin core and Bitcoin Cash.
Bitcoin core
Bitcoin is the first cryptocurrency which created in 2009 by Satoshi Nakamoto. In the first days Bitcoin was ment only as an experiment and as an alternative to the current financial (FIAT System). In the early days Bitcoin core surely was a technological invention because with it you don't need 3rd parties, you can have financial freedom and you were able to send funds across the world multiple times in a single day with transaction cost of a penny.
Example: Germany -> USA -> China -> Russia -> Australia -> Spain -> Argentina -> Turkey-> ....
In the first few years Bitcoin core concept worked perfectly and it was evolving and slowly gaining it's community base. In the early days Bitcoin network had only maybe few houndread thousand users or just few million.
In the last year community has grown exponentionaly. Bitcoin has been accepted in some countries as an alternative currency. Because Bitcoin network remained unhackable and it is robust it has gained big attention from big financial institutions and media. The mass adoption has kicked in in 2017. Futures market also played a key role in this when CBE Group introduced it will open futures market for Bitcoin. WIth this big financial institutions gained access to it and Bitcoin skyrocket to 20.000$.
Bitcoin Cash
Bitcoin Cash has been created on 1st August 2017. It was created due to the Bitcoins fork. Bitcoin Cash is not entirely a copy coin of original Bitcoins core. It has bigger blocksize which allows it's network to process more transactions per second than original core.
Bitcoin core: 3-4 transactions per second
Bitcoin Cash: Aproximately 32 transactions per second -> The block size can go up to 32mb in future which means atleast 120 transactions per second.
The fork has happened because community had different opinions about adjusting block size to Bitcoin core, so with this we have gained a "new" cryptocurrency.
Now i would like to get to the point where i want to compare both networks against each other.
Network transactions
Average transaction fee
Average transaction fee compared to other big cryptocurrencies
Summup: As far as we can see Bitcoin core has lost it's utility. It can't be used on a daily basis to send several transactions from A -> B -> C -> A -> D -> C .... Transaction fees are just to big and transactions can take up to several days. We have to keep in our mind Bitcoin was ment at beggining as an experiment and i personaly do think it worked out realy good but i think it's time that better blockchain technologies get some attention because they are fixing issues Bitcoin core has. I am not saying this is Bitcoin Cash, but if we take a closer look at statistics and fundamentals, right now it is the most scalable network in the blockchain ecosystem. Bitcoin right now is usable only for speculation purposes.
Commentary on Bitcoin core boom
This is going to be my personal opinion so it is totaly subjective. I personaly believe that Bitcoin has boomed all the way to 20.000$ is just because of FOMO (Fear of Missing Out). Blockchain technology surely is massive invention but our big daddy Bitcoin has few technological barriers which are hard to pass. Because average Joes seen it's massive price boom everybody started to buy. Since supply is realy low and with introduction of Futures market, more people and traditional investors got access to it. As far as i am watching newcomers and people that keep asking me about bitcoin is it good to buy right now, or they keep saying it will boom up to 100K$ etc...
My only question: Do these people look at fundamentals or they just buying because FOMO? My guess is it's FOMO because they just go and make an account on Coinbase or Blockchain.info,... where it's easy to buy Bitcoin with credit card and once their purchase is done they just leave the coins there. They don't move them, mostly because they don't know how to use personal wallet.
Just imagine your grandmother buys 200$ of Bitcoins, and she would want to send you this money as a christmas gift, the gift would lose 1/4 of it's value. Surely Bitcoin is still cheap to send if you are sending 1M$, or 10M$, etc... but i personaly think there are better alternatives.
Hopefully i have englightened you =)