Bitcoin Cash – The All New Crypto Kid In Town – Seeking Alpha

On August 1st, 2017, Bitcoin network hard forked as of block 478559. This was discussed in detail in my previous articles on the make or break bitcoin event and latest developments. As expected the event went out smoothly forking out the parent blockchain into two, bitcoin(BTC) and Bitcoin Cash (BCC or BTH). Now let us discuss a few interesting points about the new kid in town, the Bitcoin Cash.

The Bitcoin blockchain had forked apart, yet only few exchanges are allowing Bitcoin Cash in a tradable format. If you were holding before August 1st, you are owning Bitcoin Cash as well. But the catch is the tradability depends on the exchange where you trade. For example Bitfinex allows trading but Coinbase or Poloniex are yet to support Bitcoin Cash. So the bottom line is the overall liquidity is really low which makes the new coin heavily volatile. In the last 4 days, we have seen a high of nearly $1000 to a low of $200.

On August 3rd Poloniex came up with the below update

We will be crediting users who had BTC in their account balance at the time of the fork with matching BCH. We expect this to occur on or before 8/14/17. Keep in mind that we have not yet determined if we will be listing BCH as a market on Poloniex nor can we commit to supporting BCH withdrawals right away. The ability to withdraw BCH will depend on network stability which is completely outside of our control.

On August 5th Coinbase has come up with below update:

In the case of bitcoin cash, we made clear to our customers that we did not feel we could safely support it on the day it was launched. For customers who wanted immediate access to their bitcoin cash, we advised them to withdraw their bitcoin from the Coinbase platform. However, there are several points we want to make clear for our customers:

1. Both bitcoin and bitcoin cash remain safely stored on Coinbase.

2. Customers with balances of bitcoin at the time of the fork now have an equal quantity of bitcoin cash stored by Coinbase.

3. We operate by the general principle that our customers should benefit to the greatest extent possible from hard forks or other unexpected events.

The reason why many of the exchanges are not supporting Bitcoin Cash is because of the fact that the newly forked blockchain hasnt yet adjusted its difficulty, which happens automatically every 2016 blocks. As of now, Bitcoin cash blockchain is taking too long time to mine blocks and confirm transactions. For example, one block took nearly 10 hours instead of the ideal 10 minutes. Most exchanges require 8 block confirmations before they credit a deposit, so you can see how its basically impossible to move around bitcoin cash.

But eventually all exchanges will list Bitcoin Cash which could create huge selling pressure as investors see Bitcoin Cash as just a bonus. This is because the Bitcoin price has not gone southward after the split, which is normally the case with stock splits.

At the time of writing this article, Bitcoin Cash is the 4th highest valued crypto coin as per market cap. But sustaining this could be really hard once all exchanges start trading Bitcoin Cash. We can relate this with ethereum fork. The forked out ethereum classic reached the lowest mark of $1 before it gained momentum.

Bitcoin Cash has to prove itself for making it place worthy in the crypto space. We cannot predict its future as of now. I would personally recommend to keep your Bitcoins (BTC) for the long term and decide on BCC according to your conscience. Happy investing!!

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I wrote this article myself, and it expresses my own opinions. I am not receiving compensation for it (other than from Seeking Alpha). I have no business relationship with any company whose stock is mentioned in this article.

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Bitcoin Cash - The All New Crypto Kid In Town - Seeking Alpha