I've been meaning to revisit Bitcoin Cash and reassess its performance since launch on August 01, 2017.
When I first got into crypto, I threw myself at a lot of things and Bitcoin Cash was one of those projects I talked about early on and as you can imagine, my opinions were purely based on what I'd have found online on news outlets and personal blogs.
I have wanted, for a while, to see if I'd have a change of mind on Bitcoin Cash as a comparison to Bitcoin as my early conclusion was that it was the better chain, in terms of scalability.
I will just come right off and say it. I don't think I'll come to a different conclusion when it comes to scalability. Bitcoin Cash as of today has a block limit of 32mb, meaning it can theoretically handle 32x of Bitcoin's 7 transactions per second.
Of course, in comparison to industry numbers today, over 200 TPS is really cheap, but in comparison to Bitcoin, that translates to being 179.31x cheaper as of today.
Side by Side: Bitcoin vs Bitcoin Cash 8 years later
On 1 August 2017, Bitcoin Cash began trading at approximately $240, while bitcoin was priced around $2,700. On 20 December 2017, Bitcoin Cash reached an intraday high of $4,355.62. However, by 23 August 2018, its price had declined by 88% to $519.12. – Wikipedia
Working with the initial values above, assuming that the Wikipedia article is the most accurate, how does Bitcoin Cash compare to Bitcoin price-wise?
Bitcoin August 1, 2017: $2,700
Bitcoin Cash August 1, 2017: $240
Bitcoin today: $111,929.79
Bitcoin Cash today: $593.90
This means that 8 years later, since the hard fork, Bitcoin has grown by 4,145%, effectively putting investors at the time of the fork in 4,045% profit or $109,215 richer today, assuming they bought 1 BTC.
Bitcoin Cash on the other hand has grown by only 247%, approximately, putting investors in 147% profits if they held for 8 years and didn't sell at the December 20, 2017 peak of $4,355.62.
Evidently, Bitcoin Cash failed to outperform Bitcoin price-wise, which is often the first go-to metric for measuring how the first fork of Bitcoin has evolved.
To me, this isn't the most important metric, especially considering that the fundamental purpose of Bitcoin Cash was scalability, being the better means or medium of payments to Bitcoin.
The premise of the hard fork was quite frankly anti the concept of conditioning Bitcoin for being an investment asset, focused on storing and growing value, rather than being a medium of payments, as an alternative to Fiat.
As previously stated, Bitcoin Cash is already cheaper than Bitcoin. We can look at transaction fees and see that it costs like $0.001 to transact on Bitcoin Cash, whilst it costs a lot more on Bitcoin.
Data from coin.dance shows that transacting on Bitcoin is 179.31x more expensive than Bitcoin Cash.
Beyond this, it's interesting to note that it's apparently 3.60% more profitable to mine BCH than it is to mine BTC.
Of course, profitability here isn't looking at revenue sum, but mostly a consideration of income vs cost of mining, for which, Bitcoin Cash proves more profitable, even though not by a lot.
That said, some things still make it difficult to argue in support of Bitcoin Cash as a success.
For instance, given its foundation as a more scalable Bitcoin, you'd expect more businesses to accept Bitcoin Cash and a lot more transactions to take place on the blockchain but Bitcoin still leads on merchant acceptance (over 30,000 reported for BTC compared to about 4,000 for BCH) and transactions on Bitcoin remain much higher than Bitcoin Cash despite its limitations.
Bitcoin Cash has so far processed over 410,427,931 transactions whilst Bitcoin has processed over 1,238,781,907, effectively 828,353,976 more despite being 31× slower. In the past 24hrs, Bitcoin has processed 554,412 more transactions than Bitcoin Cash.
Evidently, in comparison to Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash hasn't performed well. However, it has managed to remain amongst leading crypto blockchains with $11.86 billion in market capitalization, ranking as the #15 most valuable crypto assets.
Bitcoin Cash is not dead yet, but it's failed at attracting adoption over Bitcoin, even in its field of specialty, being the more scalable chain for payments.
Thank you for reading!