What is Bitcoin Cash ?
A few weeks ago, Verge published an article that a top cryptocurrency prediction engine, CoinGecko, predicted that Ripple and Ethereum will threaten Bitcoin Cash. After this, Bitcoin Cash rose ~7.7% to close at $346 on December 10th, bringing in $8.2 billion dollars, becoming the 2nd-largest cryptocurrency.
How did Bitcoin Cash get to $969 when expected to be out of the picture as a cryptocurrency?
It’s complicated — Bitcoin Cash gained ~15% after Coinbase, one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges, published a blog post on December 8th, forecasting that both Ethereum and Ripple are responsible for Bitcoin Cash’s (BTC) increased value, influencing the first spike in crypto which was seen in mid-December and accelerated when Coinbase published their exact post about it.
Bitcoin Cash is unique because it never has traditional cryptocurrency properties. Unlike other currencies (bitcoin, bitcoin cash, ether, etc.), BTC comes with an ETH address, rather than the BTC address itself. It is far more decentralized than the other coins, allowing a transaction to be executed even if there is no contract signed to perform the transaction. BTC cannot be exchanged for other bitcoins or other cryptocurrency, preventing any major attack on BTC, but also helping BTC to gain value.
Aside from non-crypto features like no contract or other types of “insurance” for BTC, BTC is not a hackable currency, though it has been breached in the past. The last major intrusion happened in 2017, when hackers from the online company FunnyJobs installed malicious code to gain access to BTC’s data stores, leading to BTC being inaccessible and jammed with two more transactions, but most importantly, accidentally failing to process them. The cash system can manage even negative transactions and make them run.
At the time of writing, 5% of all BTC transactional funds are carried out on Ripple’s Hyperledger 2 ( HYLX ) network. Many miners say the malicious code from FunnyJobs planted a version of the SHA-262 vulnerability, as the three version numbers currently feature only two values. A 32-bit, 2020 SHA-2 ATM and a 22-bit Inception index have been “replace”, according to the developers of HYLX. On March 1st, Coinbase published that they had caught the hackers, but that by the time the transaction had been written, the code had been written “into the network.”
In late December, Bitcoin Cash’s price dropped to $265 before recovering in the early days of January and remaining at or near that price until Reddit, a massive internet-powered social network and messaging platform where many investors and investors, weighed in on the matter. This is where the recently-published Coinbase forecast fall flat. Proof-of-work . Proof-of-work, or PoW, allows Bitcoin Cash to grow exponentially, as according to CoinGecko. PoW all transactions on the blockchain are represented as proof of a transactions, so that each transaction tells how much actual blocks have been generated, which are the addresses at which the transaction is being authenticated. It is important to note that Bitcoin Cash utilizes a partially-Proof-of-Work algorithm, meaning that some block-recall time is lost. Even though this means that the PoW is harder to effectively run, it still makes the network worse as well.
By Reddit’s help community, it’s clear that many users are excited at the notion of an Ether-based cryptocurrency that could be decentralized and therefore lower transaction fees, which is how BTC ended up so expensive in the first place. Depending on the power of the blockchain infrastructure, which is currently taking shape with Ethereum, Hashgraph, and DIFX, it could be hours or days before the proof-of-work back-end of Bitcoin Cash reaches maturity. This lends a solid if weak case for the Ethereum-based coin.
It’s time to get even more skeptical of Ether, as most miners operate on ETH in mining:
According to CoinGecko, Ethereum is creating 130 to 200 new Ethereum blocks every 3 hours. This implies that we’re on par with Decrypt, Ethereum’s previously-emergent, decentralised, model for proof-of-work mining. This presents a time barrier for Bitcoin Cash to become widely adopted, as this application takes top mining capacity.
Then again, Ethereum’s proof-of-work algorithm — Proof-of-Speculation — launched yesterday in public beta. As CoinGecko notes, a proof-of-existence would operate similar to Proof-of-Work, though power would be lessened significantly, in theory at least.
It seems like Bitcoin Cash’s intrinsic value, based on hash power alone, has largely made it immune to Ripple and Ether’s attack-implication. Bitcoin Cash is currently
