Bitcoin Cash becomes the third largest cryptocurrency, industry leaders have something to say

Following the much-anticipated launch of Bitcoin Cash (BCC/BCH) yesterday, the alternative digital currency is now ranked third in the cryptocurrency market.

At press time, BCH’s market cap is $7.5 billion and its latest trading price is $457. In the past 24 hours, BCH prices have risen by more than 112% and in the past seven days, they have also risen by 77.51%.

Following BCH are Ripple (RXP) and Litecoin (LTC), with market caps of $6.6 billion and $2.2 billion, respectively.

At 18:41 UTC yesterday, miners took the first step toward this new development path. According to data from BlockDozer, the first block was mined by mining company ViaBTC. Block 478558 marks the complete separation of the two chains and the official birth of BCH.

However, despite the slow progress of BCH’s fork from the Bitcoin blockchain yesterday, which saw its price hit a new low of $217, it seems to be picking up speed now.

Many people are worried that the price of Bitcoin will be affected by BCH. However, from the current point of view, this does not seem to be the case. In fact, the price of Bitcoin is relatively stable.

As of press time, the price of Bitcoin is $2,707, having fluctuated only 0.22% in the past 24 hours and has risen less than 10% in the past seven days.

Some industry leaders believe that the emergence of BCH is nothing to worry about.

Coinsource CEO Sheffield Clark believes that BCH is just "much ado about nothing."

If you look at this from 30 days ago, this would basically be no big deal.

Perry Woodin, CEO of Node40, a blockchain service provider specializing in infrastructure management and blockchain auditing, said:

People who are able to profit from Bitcoin Cash will see it as a windfall, so they will invest that money elsewhere. It will become a race to see who can dump it the fastest.

Moreover, Bitcoin’s support has never changed, as evidenced by the 100% miner support for Segregated Witness (SegWit), while the SegWit2x proposal only received 88.8% support.

Solving Bitcoin’s Scaling Problem

Discussions about Bitcoin’s scalability have been going on for years, and due to disagreements on how to increase Bitcoin’s transaction capacity, the User Activated Hard Fork (UAHF) created BCH.

Although BCH has gained some support, the specific situation may be "a bit hasty." ZenCash co-founder Rob Viglione believes that in the end "most ecosystem participants will update BIP91 and activate SegWit2x."

However, he added that it would be a good thing to see two different development routes being tested.

By not forcing the two approaches to converge, we can see how they perform in real life. This is the main advantage of the cryptocurrency market: we can directly launch solutions into the market and observe how they perform, rather than arguing about theories and assumptions.

One of the main factors driving the development of BCH is that it can increase the block size from 1MB to 8MB. Yesterday, the first block of BCH contained 6985 transactions and the block size was 1.915MB; almost twice that of Bitcoin.

However, despite the support BCH has gained, some believe it will not be able to achieve long-term success.

Dash Core CEO Ryan Taylor said there are still several issues that need to be resolved.

First, Bitcoin Cash has not solved the scaling problem. It has only 'kicked the can to the curb', with only a slight increase in block size, but still lacking a reliable scaling technology to accommodate large numbers of users. Second, the services that have been integrated into the Bitcoin network will continue to exist, and the Bitcoin network will still be useful for merchants and consumers. Bitcoin Cash does not have a large number of additional features compared to Bitcoin, and it is impossible to integrate the same services because it will cost a lot of money for enterprises.

Aragon co-founder and project leader Luis Cuende even pointed out that a vulnerability may occur in the future that will cause BCH to crash.

Maybe there will be a fatal vulnerability that causes the integrated network to crash (a similar incident has already happened to Cash's predecessor BU) or people will lose interest in this currency that looks decentralized but is actually completely centralized.