Just about 6 years ago from today there was a historic event for Bitcoin and all of Crypto history. On the 1st August 2017, BTC splitted into BTC and BCH, the first Bitcoin fork. Later on BCH also splitted into BCH and BSV in 2018. A hard fork means that a blockchain network splits up into a new and an old version, reasons for that have usually been conflicts in the developer team and it was actually the same with the BTC-BCH hardfork.
Here there were conflicts of rather having larger mining block for BTC and thus having cheaper fees and faster transactions (BCH) or just keep it at the smaller blocks (BTC). So, was it really worth it?
Article of The Forbes just days after. fork and BCH price chart since its fork, picture from Pete Rizzo on Twitter (X)
While BCH still stays as the 17th Crypto ranked by market cap (and BSV is at 57th), it is still down a whopping 95% against BTC since its fork and generally down 94% from its ATH of over $1.1k in 2017 to now a price of $228. So looking at the numbers, it certainly was a failure and could never even narrowly come close to giving the actual BTC competition.
Just a small disclaimer at the end, BCH even if after the numbers has lost, this post should be no disrespect for their quite big community it has gathered over the years and the fact that it is under active development and can actually be used for low-fees and fast transactions. (unlike the Craig Wright aka Faketoshi scam of BSV)
I love these legacy posts. Never heard of BCH until now.
Long Live The King!
Another post that confirms that headlines finishing with a question mark can always be answered by « No. »
I always get BSV and BCH confused, which is a sin considering BSV is from that clown Craig Wright.
Even back than, nothing beat the original Bitcoin imo, so I never bought BCH.
Nothing can beat the original
BCH has been having a pretty great year so far though. Up around 150% since start of the year.
BCH is just not really useful. It was made to get some momentum and trick people it would do like BTC.
BCH has a catchy name, but that’s about it!
This is one of the greatest examples of social consensus you’ll ever find. Going forward, if there is another fork ever (hopefully not), the one who has the most social consensus to “own” the ticker BTC, is Bitcoin. BTC is a great brand, social consensus is one of the most interesting aspects of crypto.
Mom: “We have Bitcoin at home.”
It was such a crazy time and people really were concerned that the forking would end up destroying trust and value in Bitcoin and crypto as a whole. That wasn’t the case then, and won’t be in this bear cycle. Just keep investing in high quality projects like Bitcoin Ethereum or Litecoin and don’t stress about trying to catch the perfect entry price.
25 years ago my parents forked, they had their first child. 2 years later they forked again and had my sibling. Now 23 years later she is still a pain in my ass, an integral part of my history nonetheless
It was worth it if you dumped the forks for more BTC.
I was there 3000 years ago.
How has it failed. It wasn’t supposed to be a store of value obviously it won’t Be that expensive.
Was there as a total noob
Sold BTC and bought alts just before the fork so didn’t get any of the free BCH. Could have sold them just after the fork
On the other hand, alts automatically gained in price against BTC as BTC lost a portion of mcap to BCH
What I was never fan of is censorship in Bitcoin sub. Imagine if this sub suggested a big change and all the comments and posts that were for it got censored and deleted
I would still be for leaving the same block size but they should have used arguments instead of censorship
Crazy times
I even forgot that BCH exists 😂
Cointest pros & cons with related info are in the collapsed comments below for the following topics: Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash.
>So looking at the numbers, it certainly was a failure and could never even narrowly come close to giving the actual BTC competition.
If you want to go by success vs failure, price action is not a good metric for that. Instead, go by more important metrics like developers, traffic, volume, adoption, etc (all of which BTC obviously wins on, but it is important to make relevant comparisons).
I’m not really into BCH or BTC, but I can always admire any attempts to scale the L1 like what BCH has done.
I sold my BCH the first minute that I could, and bought more BTC. No regerts lol.
I haven’t forgotten that fucker Roger Ver’s involvement, and his fraudulent attempts after to fool newbies into buying BCash rather than BTC. I’d love to see BCH die completely with Ver left holding a bag.
Funny thing is, by 2027 we’ll see some top 50 cryptos disappear, while BTC keeps at #1, and even then, people will still degen in the next “ETH killer”.
I regret not cashing out my $2k at the time😪🤷♂️
Fork around and find out.
Well, but BCH is not the key point of the crypto space, keep that in mind
The fact that there’s still bagholders of bch and bsv, explains why drinkpisstoken gets to be a thing
I sold all by BCH pretty quickly.
One of the few times in life I got free money.
every single fork is just a bunch of upset users who group up to print more monopoly money from the initial monopoly money. You cannot create wealth by forking a chain. It is make-pretend and no amount of hopium can change that reality.
I Like BCH but it seems like every time I buy some I get fucked over, but that applies to like 90% of my investments.
I think both Bitcoin and BCH will continue to do well in the future.
I remember getting the BCH when the forked happened. I immediately sold them for BTC. 😜
BTC = BTC
​
BTC> all BTC forks
OP is comparing apples to oranges.
BCH wasn’t intended as a store of value (they actually forked because BTC main team was steering the coin towards that), and a high price isn’t its purpose, quite the contrary actually. Lower cost and high number of transactions is what BCH is after, it can cost 1USD and as long as they increased those stats they would be achieving what they were intending.
You then have XEC which takes BCH’s objectives further (shame the devteam got too greedy, that fork was interesting).
If the tickers were switched people would be praising Bitcoin for actually being useable, cheap and fast. But unfortunately most people just follow name recognition and that’s about it. So crypto has stagnated at getting very much merchant acceptance, the banks and credit card companies are pleased.
I thought there was a fork in like 2013?
I started the crypto journey with BCH and Doge. Now I only buy BTC.
It’s not as simple as that. Those first weeks and months, there was a battle over which chain was btc. The rise to $3k was the speculation that the BTCABC chain would be supported by the BTC ticker because a lot of exchanges, including coinbase, were originally supporting BTCABC. After a vicious public debate, and sketchy tactics by both sides, the chain we call Bitcoin now won the ticker. Since then the price action is not that different from the broader crypto market. It’s hard to explain to people who weren’t there how brutal and confusing the block size war was. Both sides of the debate were absolute embarrassments.
It’s ridiculous to call BCH a failure. BCH has a similar tx volume to BTC in 2017. So, either BCH is not a failure now, or BTC was a failure all the way back in 2017. BCH is accepted just about everywhere BTC is, and is accepted in far more places than Ethereum, XRP, Monero, and a dozen other top coins you are all stoked on. Are we judging success solely on the price of a coin? Are we just speculating? Or are we trying to compete against fiat currencies with decentralized digital cash?
I’m no BCH fan boy, and I hold none. When I need to make a purchase with crypto, I swap btc for XMR. If the merchant doesn’t accept XMR, I swap for BCH because it’s cheaper and faster than BTC. XMR is always my first choice, though. I respect bch because I don’t beleibe the blocksize debate has been settled by any means, and I think it’s important to have a chain that’s experimenting with larger blocks as well as btc with 4mb. I also respect the bch communies focus on crypto being decentralized cash, not the dumb “digital gold” narrative pushed by major figures in the btc community like Saylor(who openly advocates that people use visa and not bitcoin).
One more point. If BCH is a “failure” then lightening network must be an utter and absolute failure, because for more people use bch than the lightning network even though layer 2s have been being built since before the fork.
Good read. It is nice to know a little part of history on crypto once in a while. Thanks for sharing OP.
Regardless of your highly manipulated and inflated price bullshit, BTC (Bitcoin Core) has been broken since Segwit. That is unless you enjoy high fees, long confirmation times, and shit UX sidechains. No one actually uses BTC for payments though, they use Bitcoin Cash, or one of the other many, more functional, forks. They use BTC for gambling on a functionally crippled blockchain and then join the toxic BTC maxi community and try to shit on everyone else.
https://bitcoinfees.cash
BTC is king
I will always love BCH because I gambled and bought a pittance when BCH was $100 and sold it when BCH was at $300. A small happy drop in the sea of despair that is my shitcoin portfolio.
Still remember the subsequent BCH BSV split
We survived 2 more forks (vs BSV and vs XEC) and came out as winners.
We’ve been tempered in fire, survived both small block (BTC) cooption, extremely big block cooption (BSV) and dev tax & centralization attempt (XEC)
Entire time we’ve been busy building, and now have full UTXO DeFi and native token capabilities and can go for the DeFi cake. At the same time BTCers are begging for OP_CTV which is just a small subset of current BCH L1 capabilities.
That being said BCH has had quite a run this past few months if I’m not mistaken (I do not hold BCH thankfully), but kudos to anyone who thought they were doomed. Hope they exited in time lol.
>6 years ago, we had the first Bitcoin fork where BTC forked to BCH
uhhh no, the first bitcoin fork was in 2010 with the stack overflow bug. The solution was to Fork. The current “bitcoin” isnt the first/true “bitcoin”
You are completely missing the point of BCH.
All you are looking at is the price, as far as I understand it… their purpose is to be a currency, so increase in circulation and actual usage is what matters not comparing it price.
I can easily find many more places to actually use BCH than where I can viably use Bitcoin.
Bitcoin has its own purpose, BCH has a different purpose.
Its like trying to compare a tank and a sports car. It all depends on the purpose.
2017 was fun times. I still remember the ‘flippening’ where BCH was somewhat expected to overtake BTC in terms of transaction numbers, and possibly market domination. It went no where.
Then, remember when Bitcoin forked to Bitcoin Gold and Coinbase kept all the BTG that should have been provided to their customers and a California judge decided “too bad for you crypto nerds, you get nothing”. Yeah I remember….
I like BCH it’s cheap and fast and widely accepted and respected by the market regardless of its price decline issue, but I accepted the idea it’s not a SOV it’s what intended for it to be, a digital cash, so I keep my savings in Bitcoin and convert to BCH or LTC or even better to XLM or XRP when I need to do cheap and fast transaction, there is a place and a job for every coin, I don’t call any of them a failure.
I think it’s pretty common when you get into crypto to really get into the BTC history. You read about hal finney. The early days. Roger and the fork. Most of the time you get kind of irritated thinking Roger betrayed the community.
Some people stay that way, others, we realized that it’s not really a betrayal, you just had it go two different directions. In the early days there was this hope that Bitcoin would be a worldwide payment system. The BTC consensus went with smaller blocks which really drive the hash rate because mining revenues are higher. It’s the most secure network in the world. You also can’t use crypto as a payment method in America which I think factored in quite a lot. I mean it’s taxed like a property.
However what Roger did was the vision of a lot of the early people in Bitcoin. They wanted that low cost ease of transaction payment everyone could use. No one could control. It’s not centralized. I think what he has done in Saint Kitts is pretty cool. Bch really could be a thing in smaller underdeveloped countries and I actually hope it becomes such. It’s the only Bitcoin fork that I actually think deserves a place and that’s why
It’s amazing to me that basically everyone has swallowed the “Bitcoin is digital gold” utter hogwash. Satoshi made digital cash. The white paper literally has it in its title. There was also provision for raising the block size to 32 MB in the original spec as demand increased, and Satoshi spoke of needing to move Bitcoin to data centers when it actually started becoming a viable currency. Fuck, even Visa has to operate multiple giant data centers worldwide just to process payments, and that’s without mining. People who go “Bitcoin should just work on my Raspberry Pi forever” are nutjobs.
The price per unit of crypto doesn’t determine anything about its usability or utility. BCH is much more usable than BTC, and has 32 times its capacity or something thanks to 32MB blocks. So you could, in theory, actually use BCH as a world currency, by further jacking up block sizes and running it out of data centers. I think big block tests already had them reach 2000 transactions per second, which is pretty solid.
Bitcoin? Six. Six transactions per second.
Do I believe either of them will be a world currency? Fuck no, don’t make me laugh. But Blockstream, who run BTC, are either paid saboteurs or lunatics. I’m not sure which.
I feel bad for everyone that went with BCH.