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Cryptocurrency industry experts weigh on August 1st Bitcoin fork

On 01 August 2017, the bitcoin blockchain was successfully forked into two versions, thereby creating a new cryptocurrency ‘Bitcoin Cash’ (BCH).

According to Business Insider, Bitcoin Cash has all the history of the old platform, but bitcoin cash blocks will be 8MB as compared to bitcoin’s 1MB blocksize at present.

The first Bitcoin Cash block, mined by ViaBTC, had a block size of 1.915 MB and contained 6,985 transactions, CoinDesk reported. The new digital currency is now trading on a number of exchanges including Kraken, TheRockTrading, and OKCoin.

A number of Bitcoin firms made their stance clear on the network split well in advance.

Industry experts are weighing in on the controversial fork. Node40 CEO Perry Woodin said:

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.”

Dash CEO Ryan Taylor pointed out that bitcoin lacks an effective governance model to resolve contentious issues, which in turn is deterring technological progress. Noting that the August 01 event was driven by the multi-year dispute over how best to increase Bitcoin’s transaction capacity, he said:

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.

“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.”


Similar views were echoed by Aragon Co-Founder and Project Lead Luis Cuende, who said:

Short term, I believe Bitcoin Cash will be around for some time, but in the long term, I don’t see Bitcoin Cash going anywhere. Probably a fatal bug will crash the whole network (it already happened with Bitcoin Unlimited, Cash’s predecessor) or people will just lose interest in a currency engineered to look decentralized while being totally centralized.”

Commenting on the impact on investors, Cuende said: “It depends, but probably making BTC holders more wealthy, since Bitcoin is better with SegWit. Plus, the people that were actively trying to stop development on Bitcoin and centralize it, will now have their own chain to do whatever they want with it. I think this will positively impact Bitcoin.”

ZenCash Co-Founder Rob Viglione said:

“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.”


Coinsource CEO Sheffield Clark announced that they have no plans to integrate Bitcoin Cash and said:

“When we look back 30 days from now, this is essentially going to be a non-event.”

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