The fears of Bitcoin Cash splitting the Bitcoin Blockchain have materialized today. Instead of bringing an end to the scaling debate, the small group of mainly Chinese miners behind the fork has created two competing versions of the coin, BTC and BCC.
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Some exchanges, like Coinbase and BitMEX have made it clear they will not support Bitcoin Cash; others, like OKCoin and Kraken have informed users they will list the new token. Despite all of this, the price of BTC holds steady at the level around $2700.
Industry reacts
Node40 CEO Perry Woodin comments: "People who are going to benefit from Bitcoin Cash are the ones who see it as free money, so they can then invest in something else. It's going to be a race to see who can sell it the fastest."
Coinsource CEO Sheffield Clark comments: "When we look back 30 days from now, this is essentially going to be a non-event. We have absolutely no plans to integrate Bitcoin Cash at our machines at this time."
Dash Core CEO Ryan Taylor comments: "There are many misconceptions about Bitcoin Cash and what it represents. To be clear, Bitcoin is not forking. Rather, some developers have created a new digital currency and formulated an effective means of distributing it, by giving it to everyone with an existing Bitcoin balance.
Ryan Taylor, CEO, Dash
Nonetheless, the multi-year dispute over how best to increase Bitcoin’s transaction capacity is what led to this moment. Bitcoin lacks an effective governance model to resolve contentious issues, and this is clearly deterring technological progress. When an issue as simple as whether to increase the block size can lead to years of stagnation, something needs to change. In my opinion, governance is an issue that the Bitcoin community needs to take more seriously.
While the markets will ultimately decide, I think there is little chance that Bitcoin Cash will be successful in the long-term. It may have increased capacity, but several issues remain. First, Bitcoin Cash has not solved scaling. It has merely kicked the can down the road with slightly larger blocks, but still lacks a credible technology to scale to massively larger numbers of users. Second, Bitcoin will retain the network of integrated services that make the Bitcoin network useful to businesses and consumers. With no substantial enhancements compared with Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash is unlikely to be integrated into those same services, given the substantial expense for businesses operating them to do so."
Robert Viglione
ZenCash Co-Founder Rob Viglione, comments: "Bitcoin scaling has been a complicated issue for the past few years, so it's nice to see forward progress, even the situation is a bit sloppy. Most participants in the ecosystem will be upgrading with the BIP-91 activation for Segwit2x, but there's some support for Bitmain's Bitcoin Cash "User Activated Hard Fork" (UAHF) that launched at 12:20 UTC today.
The good news is that we'll see experimentation along two distinct preference clusters. Rather than forcing one way or another, we can see how each idea unfolds in real life. This is the major advantage of cryptocurrency markets: Instead of bickering over theory and assumptions, we can just bring ideas to market and see how they perform.
Still, there are pros and cons to everything. The downside of a split is that Bitcoin loses part of its ecosystem, and network effects are so important to this industry. That said, this isn't a zero-sum game and it's more than possible to see both chains flourish in parallel."
