If your following Bitcoin which most of you here on Steem are then you'll also know about Bitcoin Cash(BCH). Since the inception of BCH following the hardfork from the original Bitcoin protocol, Bitcoin Cash's value has gone down drastically, gone up drastically, back down, and now, well - who knows.
It's actual value is not really established yet has the markets have only just begun functioning correctly with the coin.
But is it just scam coin forked from bitcoin to make a quick buck, well long time Bitcoin Core developer, Gregory Maxwell, believes there is definitely something going on.
The following is a large excerpt from The Merkle:
There are plenty of reasons to be concerned over how the Bitcoin Cash mining difficulty is determined. We have seen a major influx of hashpower over the past few days, yet the network difficulty is still only 7% of that of the Bitcoin blockchain. That seems quite strange, as this lower difficulty combined with a higher hashrate allows mining pools to successfully reap block rewards in quick succession. In fact, the average block time has fallen to around three minutes at the time of writing, which means around 280 BCH is created on the network every hour.
Figuring out why this is even possible has proven quite challenging. Everyone knows the Bitcoin Cash ecosystem utilizes a unique mining difficulty algorithm which can introduce sharp drops or increases whenever needed. Right now, it seems more hashpower results in a lower mining difficulty and more coins being generated. This is a very unusual turn of events, and it causes a ton of speculation as well. One of the people weighing in on these discussions is none other than Gregory Maxwell, the Bitcoin Core developer.
In Maxwell’s opinion, there are several flaws in the BCH mining difficulty readjustment. First of all, it is possible for miners to ramp up the difficulty and mine away for 12 hours, after which time the level will attempt to readjust. It is this 12-hour window that has Maxwell somewhat concerned, since it appears the difficult calculation process is flawed at best. In the chat log, he claims that the network blocks leave an old timestamp on previous blocks for some time before jumping up to the normal time to trigger the difficulty adjustment. After that trigger occurs, miners will repeat the process over and over in order to keep the difficulty low and coins flowing in.
If that is not enough to cause concern, it appears any BCH miner can successfully trigger these difficult adjustments with little effort on their part. Even if other entities were to try to prevent this from happening, they would be unsuccessful in doing so. The result is more network blocks being created and more BCH brought into circulation. That would certainly explain why the Bitcoin Cash price has been coming down hard over the past 48 hours. Indeed, it appears there are a lot of coins being sold at an accelerated pace.
If this is true Bitcoin Cash only has a short lifespan, but while it does live it will profit these miners nicely. As Maxwell goes on to say:
…of course, inflating the mining income is in the collective short term interests for all bch miners… (maybe you can argue that in the long term they’re better off not doing things that might show weaknesses and lower its value).”
Make of it what you will, but in my opinion Bitcoin Cash(BCH) will not supersede Bitcoin(BTC), it may eventually have a place in the altcoin world, but I very much doubt it.
It seems to me like a cheap chinese imitation of Bitcoin. At first it seems like an amazing replica, with some fancy bonus functions...... but then as the days go on you realise that actually it's junk.
Sources:
The Merkle