BTC is now digital gold, store of value, new asset class, and that's fine! Make your tendies wherever you can and I wish you luck! It wasn't always like this, though... it was supposed to be more than just that.

Did you know how easy it was to send BTC around before 2015? The fees were only a few cents so it was viable for tipping people on Reddit, paying for coffee and competing with the likes of VISA! That was the talk of rBitcoin around 2014/15, competing with fucking VISA! It was advertised as "magic internet money", and magic internet money it was! Scan a QR code, click send, and look at your friend's face as it shows up instantly on his phone! Amazing! It took banks years to achieve that UX with their centralized payment systems. We had it, back in the day.

There was a problem, though. Transactions were rate limited, and this was fine when the community was small as this limit was never reached. Think of transactions as seats on a bus. If the bus is half-empty, there's no competition for the tickets. Well, now that it's full, everyone is jumping over each other to get in, and the ticket price goes up.

This led to a technical debate that lasted for years. The creator (Satoshi Nakamoto) meant to remove this limit one day but he disappeared, and the folks left in charge disagreed about how to continue. Some folks wanted to keep the same bus, some folks wanted to make a bigger bus, or a train of buses if you will. Here's what I mean, visualized: https://txstreet.com/v/bch-btc.

The small bus side argued against making buses larger as less bus makers could afford to build the new design, but they ignored that the ticket prices would prevent millions from riding the bus. Big bus side argued that anyone can try to build a bus but we shouldn't limit those who're good at it just so everyone can participate in bus making. We want everyone to ride the bus, not to be bus makers. Competing bus makers will always be free to join, but will have to up their game to current state of bus making, so - let buses be as big as people can make them, the free market will optimize the size and price of ticket.

Maybe the bus analogy doesn't hold well here, e-mail is better. E-mail is decentralized, permissionless, uncensorable and cheap for the user but it wouldn't be if you artificially limited the capacity of e-mail servers so anyone can be in the e-mail server business. No ordinary user runs an e-mail server to use the e-mail system, but as users we can freely choose which server to use, and we can freely raise capital and start an e-mail provider business if we want to.

End result: the big bus team split off. Both blockchains up till August 2017 are IDENTICAL. Both BTC and BCH are the same till that point. It was like a crypto de-merger. One team got the BTC ticker, "Bitcoin" name and brand, the other got bigger buses and BCH ticker and took the "Bitcoin Cash" name. That's the essence of it. The BCH gang wanted the "Bitcoin" brand too, but small bus gang had too much power to control the narrative so they won that battle. Narrative which big finance and big tech will now continue to perpetuate. They won that battle. Some folks in BCH still didn't accept that, and it works against BCH really because insisting on "BCH is the real Bitcoin" makes it look like a fraud - which it isn't. It's just that you can't shout that simple truth just like that, people need to realize it themselves.

BCH can now be used as "magic internet money". BTC can't, not anymore. That should be the selling point IMO. Move past the history of the conflict, it's well documented if anyone cares to look but you can't move forwards if you're looking backwards. So BTC is not competition for anything else but the Bitcoin title.

That's the gist of it. I'm not going to talk about price or whatever, this is just an intro. Anyone interested can do his own DD and dig out the details.

Who is competition to BCH, though? This:

The Next Generation Public Blockchain Crypto.org Chain is a public, open-source and permissionless blockchain - a fully decentralized network with high speed and low fees, designed to be a public good that helps drive mass adoption of blockchain technology through use cases like Payments, DeFi and NFTs.

Sure, it started as a corpo-coin, it uses staking, and some kind of masternodes or whatever, and you can hand-wave it like that all you want, it won't make it go away, better accept that reality. Tempered crypto people who have strong views about decentralization etc. have already made their bets. The game is on now to capture everyone else. They're making a push towards merchants, and could end up on our turf. We have an advantage in that we're the only community trying to build something in underdeveloped world, that could turn to be our very important strength, because there we're free to grow without competition, for now.

Why BTC is not our competition? Because all it has is the store of value narrative, and it's amazing how far it took it. And now that big tech and big finance is in on it, they will continue to own the Bitcoin narrative. We tried to compete for the narrative in 2017 and we lost the battle. The way to win it is to become so successful on our own that we can't be ignored, so good as cash that the title of Bitcoin will be automatically won when eventually everyone realizes the simple truth, that Bitcoin Cash is Bitcoin. You can't tell them the truth, it will cause rejection. They must realize it on their own. To get there, we need a billion users. BTC is our final boss.

Technology is just an enabler. A coin that's not actually used can have whatever tech it wants, it won't get far. Someone has to build with it and "sell" it. This is what the BCH community is doing, boots on the ground in Venezuela, Colombia, Africa, Australia, Slovenia, Philippines, Thailand, etc. People build, and we have people, all around the world: https://map.bitcoin.com/ Check out this https://read.cash where folks earn money by writing content etc, it's been pretty lively

PS

BCH successfully ejected a known fraud Craig Wright from the community, and later essentially FIRED lead developers (Amaury Sechet, Bitcoin ABC now) when they lost the way. What other community did something like that? BCH is the honey badger. We shed a lot of weight that us holding us down. I think now we're free to grow!

PPS

Of all alts, r/bitcoin hates BCH the most, you'll get shot down for even mentioning it. This I believe is because of the fight for the Bitcoin title.

r/btc was where the big bus gang gathered before BCH was forked off. Some talk too much about Blockstream, big money coopting Bitcoin, whine about r/bitcoin censorship etc. but that's not important and makes them sound like conspiracy theorists. It's not doing BCH any favors, but people are people, and on r/btc they're free to talk about whatever they want, censorship free. I hope the focus will shift more towards cool stuff in the future! Learn from r/ethereum community, they're builders!

BCH is magic internet money, that's what matters. Dig deeper, see what's been built and what's being built with BCH. Deep fucking value! Example: https://read.cash where people can get tipped by others for content like a reddit/medium hybrid, and it's growing!

We're Bitcoin Cash, magic internet money - join us!