A chance to hang out with some folks who are interested in Bitcoitn Cash (BCH) and maybe like me, like me, see it as having a great potential as as peer-to-peer cash for the world - and as a smart contracts platform.
This is a space to talk about, to learn about and spend some Bitcoin Cash on:
- Beer
- Soft drinks
- Hot drinks
BCH is a fork, a chain split of Bitcoin BTC that happened in 2017 when, after years of heated and polarising argument, the Bitcoin community as was, failed to come to a consensus on what they wanted Bitcoin to be.
BTC: Some people wanted a long-term, low on-chain transaction throughput which to them was an acceptable cost to mitigate what they saw as substantial risks of 'centralisation', wanting instead to push low-value transactions onto other layers. They 'won' in terms of keeping the name Bitcoin, ticker BTC, the network effect and reputation, soft forking to implement an update called SEGWIT which solved what they saw to be the most pressing issues. The severely limited on-chain transaction throughput and a shift in narrative from peer-to-peer cash to its current primary intended use case as 'digital gold' evolved hand-in-hand.
BCH: Others saw low-cost high throughput capacity as a priority to keep Bitcoin as something anyone could use on the base layer for any purpose (with forever sub-cent fees) and were prepared to take the chance that a combination of node software optimisation and advancing technology would enable this without an unacceptable degree of 'centralisation'. SEGWIT was seen by this side as a cludge and were left with no option in order to avoid it and to keep alive the dream of Bitcoin as a currency for everyone, split by means of a hard fork, thereby requiring a new name and ticker - Bitcoin Cash, BCH.
After some turbulent years, BCH accepted its (temporary?) lower popularity and took advantage of it's current 'little brother' status to develop processes of gaining community consensus and of implementing new functional and scaling features (now annually) via hard fork.
This has enabled BCH to develop a rich feature-set making it by now distinct from BTC in many more ways than bigger transaction throughput: such as powerful (UTXO) smart contracts that don't have ETH's scaling limitations, Cashtokens and an algorithmic block-size adjustment mechanism designed to maximise the odds of keeping scaling capability ahead of demand even with high growth.
Irrespective of your knowledge and experience, whether you're passionate for Bitcoin Cash, vaguely intrigued by it - or anything in between, you're welcome.
As for my own experience and interest, I got involved in Bitcoin in 2012 and have been into BCH since the fork in 2017.
Please note that whilst talking about price and markets isn't prohibited, my request is that these evenings don't turn into being mainly about 'investing' in crypto!
