On August 1st the controversial cryptocurrency Bitcoin Cash (BCH) will celebrate its one-year anniversary. After a year of spectacular highs, and some almost equally notable lows, we decided to take a closer look at the latest developments in this most polarising of cryptos.
BCH is a hard fork of Bitcoin (BTC), implemented by a group of programmers who wanted to increase the currency’s maximum block size limit. In summer 2017, discussions came to a head as a group of campaigners, including notorious early-stage Bitcoin investor Roger Ver, pushed for a hard-fork from BTC. The fast-increasing fees and transaction times associated with crypto’s leading currency, they argued, were distorting the use-case of Satoshi’s coin and pushing it into the status of “digital gold” rather than the transactional currency the original white paper espoused. And so Bitcoin Cash was created. And the rest, as they say, is history.
Except in this case it’s not. The development and detail of the BCH ecosystem is still being discussed and debated today, with significant progress being made just this week as the dedicated BCH community continue to drive the project forward.
Bitcoin Cash developers are currently working on a series of tokenization projects on the currency’s blockchain, and no less than three concepts have recently gone public. Wormhole, a forked protocol, will enable smart contracts on the BCH network and operate its own token, known as “Wormhole Cash” (WHC). The other two projects, being the Simple Ledger Protocol and Color Coin protocol, have major development teams behind them but have become the subject of heated debate due to their use of controversial “OP_Return” operations.
As with everything in the BCH ecosystem there are a wide variety of opinions and approaches. Nothing is taken for granted as the fourth largest digital currency seeks to find its way in the competitive world of crypto. Whether this approach proves to be of benefit, enabling strength through diversity, or a mere distraction from it’s chief target of being the world’s transaction crypto of choice, remains to be seen.
