Bitcoin Cash was created for the purpose of overcoming the limitations faced by Bitcoin Core, such as block size, to provide more space for transactions. Check out ‘Bitcoin Cash in 2018’ review and find out what may 2019 hide.
What BCH actually resembled, is a spin-off intended to be more usable as a payments mechanism and this week has almost tripled from about $80 to $225. However, at the time of writing it was sitting at a price of $151.85, some 10% down in the past 24 hours. The Bitcoin SV variant isn’t doing any better, either, with its price falling to just over $85, itself some 8% down. That this is happening at the same time as a U.S. stock-market selloff will no doubt warm the hearts of crypto-evangelists, who believe their currencies offer genuine alternatives for where to put money in times of trouble.
After initially sprouting from Bitcoin in August 2017, Bitcoin Cash looked poised to tackle the growing problems cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH) were facing at the time.
Bitcoin Cash is an attempt to increase the throughput of blockchain technology by increasing the block size to 32MB, allowing massively more transactions into each block compared to Bitcoin.
However, Bitcoin shortly followed up with its own temporary solution to the scaling issue — the Segregated Witness (SegWit) soft fork, which saw the Bitcoin blockchain gain a 60 percent throughput boost. This combined with the recent Bitcoin Cash hard fork has seen user sentiment fall dramatically as the blockchain struggles to find its feet.
This was until August 2018 when Bitcoin Cash got caught in a civil war, again over block size limits. The result was a split of Bitcoin Cash into two rivaling cryptocurrencies in November — Bitcoin ABC (backed by Roger Ver and Bitmain’s Jihan Wu) and Bitcoin SV (backed by Craig Wright) which would maintain block sizes of 32 MB and 128 MB respectively.
With the support of a majority of exchange desks, Bitcoin ABC became the new Bitcoin Cash (BCH) post the split, and Bitcoin SV became a separate cryptocurrency with the BSV ticker.
BCH/USD Performance Review Shows Bullish Aspect of BCH Toward the Years End
BCH opened for trading for the first time on August 1, 2017 at $294.60. By January 1, 2018, it was trading at $2,534.82 what is a 760 percent increase.
In January, BCH fell more than 26 percent to $1,772 and didn’t stop declining since until November 14, when it split into two cryptocurrencies.
BCH closed on $425.01 on November 14, and the two resultant cryptocurrencies were trading at $ 289 (BCH or Bitcoin ABC) and $ 96.50 ( BSV or Bitcoin SV) on November 15. This represented a significant market loss for BCH as the two cryptocurrencies combined couldn’t make up to BCH’s market price the day before.
Just for compare, in 2017, when BCH split from BTC, the price of the two cryptocurrencies combined was worth more than the price of BTC alone, resulting in a gain for BTC owners.
Major Events of 2018
After a decent start in 2018, listing on Coinbase’s cryptocurrency exchange desk GDAX in December 2017, the initial demand was so high that Coinbase had to abruptly disable its trading.
Soon after, fear over crackdowns in China and South Korea took over the cryptocurrency market, and BCH couldn’t escape the fate either, effectively ending its bull run.
In February, decentralized marketplace OpenBazaar added support for BCH on its platform. In March, Goldman-Sachs backed Circle, Abra, and Grayscale Investments began offering BCH on their platforms as well.
In July, US financial services company Robinhood also started offering no-fee trading of BCH on its mobile app.
In August, Bitcoin ABC announced a software upgrade for Bitcoin Cash with a smart contract feature to allow developers to build applications over its blockchain. This move was met with resistance led by self-proclaimed Bitcoin creator Craig Wright and cryptocurrency news website Coingeek, who launched their own Bitcoin Cash implementation called Bitcoin SV, with the aim of increasing scalability and transaction speeds.
The incompatibility of the two implementations ultimately resulted in a hard fork in November. After it happened, Bitcoin Cash began attracting mainstream attention when two competing software-development teams failed to agree on how to best update the code and ended up splitting the network. The fight was blamed for contributing to the biggest drop in eight months for Bitcoin, which Bitcoin Cash had split off from last year.
While BCHABC almost immediately became the longer chain, BCHSV saw support from exchanges, seemingly prepared to take over the entire network.
The Bitcoin Cash SV maintains the support of Coingeek owner Calvin Ayre; its blocks are mined by the Coingeek pool, SV pool, and BMG pool while Bitcoin Cash ABC is supported by Bitmain CEO Jihan Wu and has so far been mined by BTC.com pool, Bitcoin.com pool, AntPool, ViaBTC, and Waterhole.
On its Birthday, Bitcoin Cash has set its foot in 19 services, some of them being Bitpay, Coinpayments, Coingate, Coindance, Viabtc. It is also a part of 14 different projects, namely, JoyStream, OpenBazaar, Counterparty among others and is available on 41 exchanges, as stated by Alejandro de la Torre, the Vice President of Business Operations at BTC.com.
He also mentioned:
“Now entering its second year, BTC.com is poised to help the Bitcoin Cash community shift focus from investment, thinking only in terms of storing of value, to cash, thinking as a medium of exchange for merchants and consumers.”
What to Expect in 2019?
The next hard fork is going to take place in May 2019, which is giving major expectations to the BCH community. BCH ABC is introducing Schnorr signatures, which would be advancing the scaling properties, by reducing bandwidth and storage space by more than 25%. It even offers multiple advantages if the protocol is coupled with transaction tumblers.
Trading company Trading Beasts predict that 2019 might prove to be lucky for BCH and its price can move upwards to around $2703.17 by 2019 end.
Self-proclaimed Bitcoin Jesus Roger Ver predicts that Bitcoin Cash might be 2 times more valuable in a years time. Smartereum predicts that Bitcoin Cash might reach as high as $6700, which is around 500% growth in less than a year. Very optimistic are from Us Lifted who predict that the value of BCH might reach as high as $9,735 by the end of 2019. From Crypto Ground they think that Bitcoin Cash can plunge upwards and might reach $707 by the end of 2019.
Negative approach however, comes from co-founder of crypto fund Multicoin Capital, Kyle Samani who confirmed that after mass discharge of employees, Bitmain would liquidate its crypto-assets worth of $316 million, which could be bearish for Bitcoin Cash and Litecoin prices in 2019.
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