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Roger Ver, the digital currency enthusiast known as ‘Bitcoin Jesus’ is still struggling to win converts to his preferred coin Bitcoin Cash (BCH), this evident as blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis claims that BCH is barely being used in commerce.
Bitcoin Cash Continues to Struggle
Chainalysis came to its findings due to a review of payments received by the world’s 17 largest crypto merchant processing services, platforms like BitPay, Coinify, and GoCoin.
The findings showed that Bitcoin Cash payments slumped to $3.7 million in May — from a high of $10.5 million in March. By comparison, Bitcoin payments totaled $60 million in May, down from a peak of $412 million in September, 2017.
These declines, in some ways, mirror the general dip in the value of digital currencies that we have witnessed throughout 2018. But. comparatively speaking, Bitcoin has dropped by about 55% where Bitcoin Cash has dropped by 75%.
As for market capitalization, after peaking in December, Bitcoin Cash’s has dropped by about 85% to $9.4 billion, this compared to over $110 billion for Bitcoin currently (according to Coin Market Cap). So while Bitcoin Cash is the fourth-largest digital coin, its market cap is still less than 10% of its bigger brothers.
“There are fewer users of Bitcoin Cash, fewer holders,” Kim Grauer, senior economist at Chainalysis, said in an interview with Bloomberg.
BTC Vs. BCH
It was just over a year ago when Bitcoin Cash hard forked and split from the official Bitcoin blockchain. Shortly after, Ver switched allegiance to Bitcoin Cash and overhauled his Bitcoin.com site to focus primarily on the off-shoot, as opposed to Bitcoin itself. For him, the only way to scale Bitcoin to the level that it could successfully serve the world as a means of payment was to increase the size of the blocks comprising its blockchain (as Bitcoin Cash did).
Many other developers disagreed, citing concerns over increased centralization. Since the split, advocates from both sides have battled on social media.
As for Bitcoin Cash, as noted, adoption in commerce has been low, partly the result the aforementioned concentrated ownership, Grauer said. About 56% of Bitcoin Cash is controlled by 67 wallets not located on exchanges, according to Chainalysis. Of those, two wallets hold between 10,000 and 100,000 BCH. And, according to Grauer, chances are the wealthiest holders are the ones sending a lot of the traffic to merchant services.
Despite all this, Ver has remained undeterred. He highlighted how many transactions Bitcoin Cash is doing in an August 13 Tweet, saying, “the long-term price of a cryptocurrency is a function of its usefulness as a currency.”
Looking ahead, Ver doesn’t have all his stakes in Bitcoin Cash out of the gate. For Ver thinks a “flippening” — the overtaking of Bitcoin’s market cap by another cryptocurrency — is going to happen soon. First with Ethereum, then with Bitcoin Cash:
“I see it happening, and I believe it’s imminent… Ethereum could overtake bitcoin by the end of the year and Bitcoin Cash could do the same before 2020.”
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