Makes a lot of sense for the NIST to say this. They will never be able to control BTC, but BCH could be very easy to control by spamming the network (Bcash only selling point is cheap transactions, so when the cost rise they have to increase block size again) so block sizes rise and only a few will run a full node (expensive and doesn't pay). They only have to compromise or attack these few full nodes to control / destroy Bcash. Short term Bcash could work fine, but the core devs are not stupid, they think about future treats like centralized nodes and selfish mining.
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With the large blocksize it is extremely difficult to span BCH. Also "BCash" happens to be a Brazilian payment system.
Brazillion, like a brazillion times Bcash has hustled people into their product.
Bcash is not at scale so at the moment nobody is willing to spend a lot of money to spam it. Once it get really used (I wonder if this will ever be the case, Litecoin is better off chain and LN is rolling out now) big players will spam, it is relatively cheap to raise the transaction price just enough to scare away the users (remember? users came to Bcash because it is cheap and not for any other reason). A hardfork will be forced by the users, so a rich individual or government can force bigger blocks (what leads to node centralization).
Actually, users initially switched to Bitcoin Cash because of the fundamentals. Now both merchants and users are starting to see that it's a lot more reliable and easy to accept than many other cryptocurrencies, but most people still don't seem to even realize how much cheaper it is than for example Litecoin.
There's a lot of misinformation, social media spam and sock puppets both spreading propaganda and pretending to be Bitcoin Cash users in order to discredit it. There were also initial set backs when launching the fork, although they were fixed later.
-This is an informational bear market for Bitcoin Cash, combined with a general bear market in crypto right now. Still, price stays relatively stable from where it was a few months ago. It may drop much more and the market would still be fine. All of this suggests that Bitcoin Cash - as opposed to the many fake airdrops that were released just prior to and after it - is here to stay.
Perhaps I'm making a mistake, but lets see how this comment aged 1, 2 and ultimately 4 years from now.
Bitcoin Cash is a much more advanced solution that simply raising the block size and doing nothing else, even if raising it is critical.
The limit set in place by Satoshi was never meant to remain, but to be gradually increased and not stand in the way of actually scaling. It was a short term solution to solve a particular attack vector that Bitcoin would outgrow over time. Research suggests that we might not even need to keep it at all anymore, but it's definitely possible to scale past it.
It's even possible to do so without hindering people from running half functioning so called "full nodes" that don't actually generate blocks, when this was not part of Bitcoins security scheme to begin with and they really do not count as nodes at all per the design PDF because they are easy to create without as much investment risk as running an actual mining node, or even running a simple "miner" connected to a pool.
The reason this is not being done is more political than technical. At this point it makes sense to let ticker BTC do its own thing and perhaps find other clever ways of scaling. BCH can live on as its own thing. It is Bitcoin, as far as I'm concerned, even if it doesn't bare the exact same name. It has already proven many experts wrong and could continue to do so in the coming years.
The best argument I see against Satoshis scaling solution is probably that the network should not rely on mining nodes for security. But much better then would be to find a way to let regular users be simplified "miners" more easily and for such "miners" to have influence even if they connect to a pool. DPoS might be an even better solution and would also limit the "wasted" energy spent on mining, even if it could per the original design be said to contribute to security by giving block generators an initial expense.
In any case it will be interesting to see where both systems head next and also whether the exchange tickers can eventually be used as a hedging instruments against one another.