Bitcoin Cash (BCH) is a project to fulfil Satoshi's dream of creating a hugely popular, permissionless, trust-less, programmable, digital cash system and sound money.
Bitcoin Core (BTC) is not our competition. The Lightning Network is a terrible design that will not be able to compete with Bitcoin Cash. I'm not making this post to debate that. I've seen the facts and made up my mind. Liquid has more in common with Paypal than with Bitcoin. The BTC base layer is constrained and intermittently yields very high fees. Bitcoin Core will die on its own. It's a short term burden that we must deal with. However...
We should not let the BTC behemoth distract us from the real competition.
Which other coins are getting accepted as cash like Bitcoin Cash is?
Primarily it's Dash & Litecon. oops, typo!
- Check out all these Dash merchants.
- Notice how many places that accept BTC & BCH also accept Litecoin. For example: this was posted today.
- Many of the easy to use cryptocurrency on-ramps accept Litecoin. Example: Coinbase.
Despite Litecoin's higher market cap, I think Dash is more of a threat than Litecoin. Dash has a big, passionate... and slightly crazy (no offence intended Dash guys... you are though) community. Dash has easy to use privacy features built into some of their wallet software. Dash has a fair bit of merchant acceptance. Dash has an Instant Send feature that allows for relatively secure zero-conf payments. The Dash culture is uber focused on ease of use. We can do better on all fronts, however: we really have to do better.
I have personally assessed that Litecoin and Dash are inferior to Bitcoin Cash. However, this does not mean that they are not competition and they will not slow the growth of Bitcoin Cash. We must focus on making sure that Bitcoin Cash is better than them in every way possible. Bitcoin Cash needs to be:
- easier to use
- easier to obtain
- easier to spend
- more widely accepted
- more private and fungible.
- more secure
- less stressful & more certain (~coughs~ ABC ~coughs~ SV. FFS guys! Please listen to BU)
- BCH needs to be better in every way.
Some final comments on other cryptos:
- Monero: I'm a big fan of Monero, but I consider it to serve a different function to BCH. Monero currently has low acceptance, is harder to use than BCH and has considerably higher fees making it impractical for very small payments. You wouldn't pay for a chocolate bar at a store with Monero with typical fees. Monero may overlap more with Bitcoin Cash in the future. For now, Monero is the best privacy focused, medium to high value transfer & storage system for smart people. It's a niche within a niche.
- Ethereum: intermittent high fees. Lower acceptance than Dash & Litecoin (I think). The focus is on DAPPs not cash.
- EOS: low fee, DAPP system. Check their subreddit and you'll find they have some quite big usability hurdles. It's not a short term threat.
- ZCash, Nano and Decred are all trying to build cash systems. They are currently of little threat due to their lack of adoption, but they are all worth keeping an eye on.
- Bitcoin Gold... how is this thing so highly valued and why is it still around? It's not a threat; it is an anomaly. It's like an old, 3 legged, blind & wheezing dog that the family thought wouldn't make it to Christmas, but it survived 5 more.
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