So I'm still trying to figure out where to lay blame to what blew the house of cards over this time and, from the voices of the internet, I seem to be hedging more towards bitcash getting listed on Coinbase. Now whether or not it was a conspiracy to commit insider trading on the part of Coinbase, or if it was just the least professional launch of a service I've seen in sometime, is a little beside the point in my book. I feel the real culprit here is actually listing a 4th option. In terms of sales they always say give 3 options. Most will gravitate to the middle or last in terms of price, but some will always see if they can portion off the luxury one. In the past year if you pulled up price performance from BTC/ETH/LTC you'd see the biggest gainer has actually been ETH by a factor of 100x with LTC a close 2nd at around 97-98x (well, maybe not after today) and BTC only hitting around 23x at it's recent average high.

Introducing a 4th option, especially in a contentious way, has cracked that system a little. On-top of that it's Branding is confusing and it's purpose is not unique. The other 3 options had arguments for their existence. BCC or BCH or Bcash, depending on when you're talking about it, is hard pressed to make an argument for it's existence besides being a "better" Bitcoin without being able to note what BTC was missing to the consumer. If what makes it better is that it's cheaper, then what's LTC? ...and honestly it's not really cheaper if it's value is not explicit besides brand jacking the market leader.... And how would you even compare it with Ethereum to the retail market?

It also shouldn't be understated that the brand of Coinbase, which has been in my opinion intrinsic to this latest bull run and a key factor to the market rise this year, has been compounding this effect by showing it's own, new cracks in this situation. Prior to the surprise launch of Cash, Coinbase was the rightful rock of the market by comparison to other exchanges, being an excellent, reliable resource for casual players to track, having the most user friendly UI and engagement process, and a CEO who was vocal in the corner of his customers. After the bizarrely surprise launch of Cash, Coinbase is now known for halting trading to their benefit, a hilariously broken exchange feed with the potential for insider trading and price fixing. It will forever be a question of why they surprised launched Cash from a marketing standpoint when not even they were ready for it.

Honestly though, I don't think it can be stressed enough how important Coinbase's brand was in facilitating this years markets and I feel like I just watched it all come down from two angles and this round of chaos is everyone trying to figure themselves out.

Thoughts?