A big weekend for Bitcoin Cash

It was off to the races with Bitcoin Cash (BCH) this weekend after the failure of the SegWit2x hard fork to launch. Speculative funds and the appetite for possible free tokens pulled money away from Bitcoin (BTC), although the combined market cap of the two coins stayed roughly the same. BCH reached a high of $2,800 before dropping 60% to $1,110, just in case the 10% swings in Bitcoin were getting a little boring (at one point Bitcoin was down as low as $5,500 after its recent $7,000-plus heights). BCH is hovering and rising slightly, currently just under $1,300, but there is literally no telling whether it will return to its pre-fork value in the region of $600, or rise to challenge Bitcoin again at sub-$3,000 or even above. It’s not true to say, though, that “the hopes and dreams of Bitcoin Cash officianados have been dashed in the last 24 hours”. Whether it’s a dream or a nightmare, this is only the beginning. Some in the crypto-currency world, like Ted Rogers of Xapo, believe that scalables such as BCH and Ethereum will supplant Bitcoin in the long-term as it grows dinosaur-like in its speed and attitude to progress. Its ever-higher transaction fees suit the business, but not the customer. Faster transactions and bigger blockchains (BCH has 8MB to Bitcoin’s 1MB) are predicted to bury it. Or will they? At a healthy $6,436, Bitcoin is weathering this storm of rivals, perhaps because the scalables and off-chains such as Litecoin are revealing how Bitcoin is maturing into what it might become: a solid base of the value pyramid in cryptos (as Tom Luongo theorises), acting more like real physical gold by being difficult and expensive to trade relative to its crypto-offspring. It’s these characteristics that could make Bitcoin the grandfather of the whole system, a trustworthy, reserve asset backstop to the altcoins built on top.