12 Reasons Bitcoin Cash is the Real Bitcoin

Why Bitcoin Cash Was Born
Bitcoin Cash was born not out of greed, deceit, or opportunism, but rather from the passion of the community who wanted to see Bitcoin continue as peer-to-peer electronic cash.

The August 1st fork was (and still is) a divorce with heated emotions on both sides. Although I admit to having my own personal biases, I believe I can present you with 12 objective reasons to support the idea that Bitcoin Cash IS in fact, “the real Bitcoin”.

Reason #: Bitcoin is Supposed to Have Low Fees
Bitcoin, from the early days, was touted as a low fee solution to global payments. It would have never gained any traction to begin with had it not been superior in this regard. Satoshi Nakamoto (Bitcoin’s creator) even said, “We should always allow at least some free transactions”.

This has been practically forgotten by the Bitcoin Core supporters. Case in point: The Bitcoin.org website was recently updated to reflect the abandonment of low fees:
Reason #: Bitcoin Should be A Reliable Network
This is directly related to the high fee situation, which stems from the fatal decision to limit Bitcoin’s transaction capacity. Because transaction capacity is limited, you are unlikely to get your transaction included in the next Bitcoin block unless you pay a higher fee than everyone else who is waiting.

This makes the network unreliable and in some cases, unusable. Even if you pay a reasonably high fee, it is possible for your transaction to get stuck for hours or days as more and more users jump ahead of you with ever greater fees.

It used to be that if your transaction wasn’t included in a block in 72 hours, it would be dropped from the memory pool (“mempool”), and the funds would be sent back to your wallet. However, that waiting period was increased to 2 weeks. That’s right — your funds can be stuck in limbo for 2 weeks and you don’t even know if your transaction will go through.

This is the exact opposite of a reliable payment network.

Bitcoin Cash, on the other hand, has plenty of space in the blocks. It is reliable. It is the Bitcoin we all knew and loved.
Reason #: Bitcoin is “A Peer to Peer Electronic Cash System”
If you read the Bitcoin Whitepaper, the title says it all: Bitcoin: A Peer to Peer Electronic Cash System.

When Bitcoin hit the scene, it was so exciting because any individual could send money to anyone on the planet…almost instantly, without high fees, and without permission from anyone.

It was all about Electronic Cash that was cheap, fast, and secure, and it was all about being able to make payments.

Since transaction fees on BTC have skyrocketed, its supporters have moved away from that narrative. They now say that Bitcoin is instead “digital gold”…and that its main use case is that of a “store of value”.

Not only have the original values of Bitcoin been abandoned and perverted, but this new party line doesn’t even make sense. If it’s “digital gold” only because people believe it and not because its useful, then how is that any better than a pyramid scheme?

Bitcoin Cash continues the P2P Electronic Cash system that is Bitcoin.
Reason #: Bitcoin Should Allow Instant Transactions
A transaction is confirmed once a miner includes it in a block. Transactions not yet included in a block are unconfirmed but are expected to be included in a block soon. The practice of merchants accepting a transaction as valid, even before it is confirmed is known as “0-conf”.

Historically, this has been relatively safe for small to medium sized transactions. However, with a congested network and uncertainty over when (if ever) your transaction will be confirmed, the security and reliability of 0-conf is destroyed.

Worse, Bitcoin Core has introduced a feature called replace-by-fee (RBF). It attempts to fix some of the problems of high fees by allowing users to replace their transaction using a bigger fee. However, it makes double-spending very easy, which essentially kills 0-conf transactions.

Although RBF is an optional setting, merchants would have to upgrade their software to specifically prohibit RBF in order to accept 0-conf, and even then, there’s still the problems of backlogs and congestion.

Bitcoin Cash implementations do not use RBF, and the network is uncongested, making 0-conf possible again.
Reason #: Bitcoin Cash Allows Combining and Splitting Value
Satoshi Nakamoto’s original whitepaper has stood the test of time and remains a brilliant encapsulation of the most important technical facets of Bitcoin.

An often overlooked part of the paper is section 9: Combining and Splitting Value. When you spend Bitcoin, you’re usually splitting off a part of an unspent output and sending change back to yourself. And when Bitcoin is received, it is combined if there was more than one output.

This is happening all the time, even though you might not give it much thought. Yet, high Bitcoin fees make combining unspent outputs very expensive. A $10 fee can turn into a $100 fee or worse.

So, the functionality is hampered. The privacy and fungibility of the coin is also compromised as users tiptoe around this problem by minimizing their transactions.

But… tiptoeing only goes so far. You may be shocked to discover that as much as 55% of all Bitcoin addresses in use are not even spendable, as they contain an amount smaller than the cost of combining those funds into a transaction.

Bitcoin Cash doesn’t have these problems, and it allows users to freely split and combine their coins.

Reason #: Bitcoin Cash is Censorship Resistant
One of the big talking points from Bitcoin Core supporters is that the high fees are worth it because of how “censorship resistant” the Bitcoin blockchain is.

It may be worth it if you are transferring large amounts of capital and can afford to pay the high fees. But for the rest of the world, being priced out of using the blockchain is the quintessence of economic censorship.

A second layer solution, namely the Lightning Network, does not help much. It is inherently susceptible to economic censorship because the network structure will coalesce around large, heavily connected hubs.

Those hubs, as they grow larger, will come under increasing regulatory pressure as money transmitting businesses… and they cannot be effectively routed around for the same reasons that they exist to begin with.

Out of the two systems, only the original blockchain-based Bitcoin system, with low fees, is truly censorship resistant. That system is Bitcoin Cash.

Reason #: A Bitcoin is Defined as a Chain of Digital Signatures
This is the most “technical” reason in this article, so don’t worry if you don’t fully understand it.

You see, Bitcoin Core adopted a proposal known as Segregated Witness, or ‘SegWit’ for short. SegWit took the digital signatures that were part of every transaction, and moved them to a separate (i.e. segregated) part of the blockchain.