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RE: Top 100 Cryptocurrencies - ( Populous / Bitshares / Electroneum / SALT / Binance Coin ) - Part 5
Thanks, I might. Just my initial comment is that Bitcoin is king because it's the base pair for exchanges besides USD and national currencies. In other words, unless BCH base pair became big there is almost no reason to assign any useful value to BCH. Yet market hype, lack of investor knowledge, and news events behind BCH are driving it higher. Long, long, term, I favor actual usefulness over near-term news and media events... because usefulness can be relied upon even when news events go south.
For me it is clear BCH provides more utility as things currently stand. BCH tx fees & times are an order of magnitude quicker and cheaper than on BTC. However, the de facto rebuttal here is that those advantages come at the cost of decreased decentralization (and maybe even security, with some re-allocation in hashpower heading to BCH).
The main counter argument to the current state of the BTC protocol is that lightning / 3rd-party integrations via segwit or segwit2x will allow for quicker txs and lower txs costs, while remaining more decentralized.
A (arguably bias) research paper by one of the main individuals behind BCH points out why segwit is not a sustainable solution: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2993315 There are similar articles and sentiments around this claim that raise interesting points, if true. As for the decentralization claim, both have the majority of their mining activity split by a handful of parties so if either chain has additional decentralization it would probably be marginal at best.
In the end, commerce will be drawn to the chain which provides the most utility. When legitimate businesses are given the choice between increased decentralization or significantly reduced tx time and cost, it is safe to assume they would choose the latter.
This could be why Amazon hasn't accepted bitcoin yet, why would consumers ever pay 50$ and wait hours to make a transaction with BTC when they can use visa and have it done instantly at close to no cost to them.
I think the point some investors fail to realize when comparing BTC/BCH is that one (BTC) aims to be a decentralized store of value while the other (BCH) serves to facilitate commerce with a reasonable level of decentralization.
(Disclaimer: I'm not for-or-against either BTC/BCH, I just believe they are inherently suited to serve different purposes in the long run.)