I felt the responsibility of doing this post to clear a couple of things.
Main things I want to straight up clear:
- I don't think r/btc is doing censorship. I've heard of some people complaining about it; however, in general terms, I think this subreddit allows a decent amount of freedom.
- I don't have anything against the core BCH team; I actually supported them during the fork (BCHN) and have been working with them on various projects related to Bitcoin Cash over time.
As you may know, I am Oscar, and I used to be a Venezuelan BCHer, which means my favorite coin was BCH in terms of usage during (mostly) 2017-2019/20. However, just to keep things as clear as possible, I was never over-invested in BCH; I always held a portfolio with percentages of different main coins (BTC/ETH/AVAX... etc) because I always had the mindset not to lay all eggs in one basket. So no, this is not about price action at all. If that were the case, I would have left long ago.
So why are you leaving BCH?
I will start talking about the least important but last event that happened that made me decide to go off from this project finally.
I got banned from an official sBCH channel for pointing out my opinion on a subject (Basically calling sBCH a dead chain which is an objective truth). And by the time I posted my opinion, I was getting attacked by four users, finally leading to my ban for no practical reasons and just subjective reasoning. This was disappointing because Bitcoin Cash was a coin that had strong "community" values against censorship in general. I want to clear up that being banned on sBCH for me is practically being banned from a main BCH channel, even if it is an L2 discussion channel. Why? Because many of the people asking for the ban and the mods themselves (or part of them) have too much influence among the general BCH community and will probably gain more over time, even if they don't manage to fix the messy sBCH project.
For me, this was the last thing I was going to endure with Bitcoin Cash.
The other reasons:
- Lack of investment in marketing and proper branding. A lot of people might see this as a non-important point, but marketing and branding are main things to care about, especially if you are trying to reach the general public. The only project that actually did a little about this was Bitcoin.com, for obvious reasons. Aside from that, just a few projects really cared to give a good image and a proper user interface for their users.
- Too many forks. BCH proved that crypto might end up forking itself into infinity. And even if BCH probably won't have more forks now (hopefully), it already forked its mcap x3. This doesn't fit good for small/big investors as they might be scared to buy a coin that could potentially fork in the future.
- Adoption of BCH might look "fine" with the pro-BCH island city, but in reality, is not looking good anywhere else. This comes from someone who had three major projects in Venezuela to promote BCH. The first one was a platform to allow people to exchange BCH for fiat (InstaBitcoin), the second was a website to look for jobs which I took the role of CEO and made it what it was today (CoinGigs), and finally, I was running events and talks in my city onboarding merchants around the city. For reference: https://news.bitcoin.com/over-200-venezuelan-taxis-discover-the-benefits-of-bitcoin-cash/
However, in Venezuela and many other countries (first-hand data I got), BCH adoption is lacking. All those merchants that used to accept BCH only did it for a short-term benefit (getting paid by the BCH users going for the meetups) or directly getting some people to pay the merchants to place stickers and try to accept BCH as payment.
Sadly, today most of the merchants have already left BCH as a payment method and are using Binance P2P platforms to do payments (which basically works similarly to Zelle). All people in Venezuela are accepting crypto through Binance and no on-chain txs. In Binance, they could change it instantly for USDT, or the user could swap their cryptos to USDT in order to pay. With the Binance method, merchants basically remove the hassle of holding assets/coins that change the price every minute. For the merchants, it was a matter of weeks or months before removing the BCH stickers due to: Lack of users paying daily, volatility, and a non-friendly user interface and experience to trade BCH into fiat. In Venezuela, I tried to fix that with InstaBitcoin (and did fix it for a while until we ran out of liquidity).
TLDR: Binance/L2s won the adoption war. Bitcoin Cash probably won't get used because of its over-complicated user interface and user experience for avg Joe. - As Vitalik said, decentralization is not absolute, it's a matter of degrees. In this aspect, we could honestly say Bitcoin (BTC) is winning because it has the bigger amount of hash backing it up against attacks. However, if we consider developer(s) control over the protocol (even if that power isn't absolute), it replicates into all the other cryptos.
In short, BCH, BTC, ETH, and most (if not all) cryptos have a major development team or a major node developer. The node developer with the biggest amount of miners and exchange supporting it will win and will take power to decide what's going to be the next update. There's no such thing as democracy or not even a fair system of changes here, it's just war to see who can convince the real players to get the support needed. Today Blockstream controls BTC, BCHN controls BCH, and Viltalik controls ETH, and all three could change (for example, just like BCHABC did get replaced), but the resources to do the replacement are only possible with the right connections. Is not something anyone can do, and BCH got lucky at this point to have all the necessary influence to prevent ABC from keeping control over the protocol. In another case, where people with a lack of resources wanted to take control of the node for honest and good reasons, it would have failed completely, leading to a minority fork. - Market conditions for BCH are at the worst stage ever. This only partially affected me even if, at some point, I generated a profit (especially with the last recent pump). However, the constant price downfall is one of the main reasons why BCH won't get adopted compared to BTC or ETH long term. Investors and business owners aren't interested in holding a coin that will go down in price constantly, and sadly, in this case, it's not particularly because of random market conditions; it's because of BCH's own fault. To be specific: Constant forks, public figures that used to support BCH betraying it, CoinFlex rug pull due to unprofessional company management and corruption, plus lack of incentives to actually use and hold BCH (and everything said before adds up to this point).
- Darknet and deep web: There's no BCH adoption there. This point should be self-explanatory, but the fact people don't use BCH to buy stuff on the darknet and deep web and rather use BTC and Monero is a big red flag. If we expect people to find BCH utility, the first group of users that should be adopting it are those markets. However, there's no market from what I was informed and checked myself that actually used BCH as a payment method. This, for me, is the biggest red flag, as the people that should care about this product don't care because, for them, there are better options. Could be price action? Or could be non-anonymous txs? Heck, even ETH is used there, and people rather mix those coins with Tornado. Bitcoin Cash fusions aren't getting positive metrics from what I know, so from both sides, BCH is not a compelling product. Maybe fees aren't everything in this adoption equation.
- The EVM experiment is dead. And some people might not agree with me, but let me give you a short story: I have experience with EVMs, and I worked with projects on AVAX, sBCH, SOL, and ETH. From the EVM perspective, and in general, terms, having a chain with no backup at all is a tremendous warning itself. But the fact the peg hasn't been fixed for over 2 months is incredibly insane. So yes, don't expect sBCH to survive this without starting from 0, trying to regain the trust that won't come back thanks to CoinFlex. The EVM experiment is dead and won't come back. I am not being pessimistic, if you believe otherwise, you are being over-positive, and I would sadly tell you to stop the religious following on these groups/scammers that rug pulled you.
- Main BCH figures get tainted every time, the last one: Roger and Mark Lamb (+ many of those people that got thousands of dollars from Flipstarter and never finished anything). And yes, people will probably be kicking Roger over the next few months if Mark is right about his lawsuit. Which is a potential truth at this point (and no, this doesn't mean Mark is good, Mark is a corrupt scum no matter the outcome). About the Flipstarter part, we could safely say we were wrong about the investment method; Flipstarter wasn't a good way to give money because it gave no responsibility to the project owners. And yes, to be transparent, I ran a Flipstarter in the name of CoinGigs, which was successful, and also completed all the promises listed in the donation window.
Note: I left CoinGigs and gave all the power to its previous owner, and since that, the project has been completely abandoned and unused with no updates at all. I did my job, upgraded it, and left (modern user interface, side-shift integration/multi-coin usage, marketing with low-budget and much more). - Many of the OGs left, and after the CF drama, probably all of them.
And that's it. Those are the reasons why I am out. I hope you know to understand why the ban was the last punch for me.
For a positive endpoint, I want to say that I think BCH is still a good project with a good heart, but sadly it's not going well and most likely won't grow more from this because of all the points I mentioned before. And they'll probably repeat in the future. The BCH community betrayed itself when it gave all the power to such an important product (sBCH) to a DEX (CoinFlex).
Have a good day, and I wish luck to Bitcoin Cash!
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