The past 24 hours have been pretty interesting for the Bitcoin ecosystem, to say the least. Bitcoin Cash’s fork has gone off without too many problems, which is good to see. There have been no major network issues so far, and the BCH price across exchanges more than doubled from a low of US$216 prior to the fork to its current US$443. Things are looking quite positive for this altcoin; that much is evident. The bigger question is whether or not its momentum can be maintained.
Bitcoin Cash Launch Is a Moderate Success
A lot of people had been doubting whether the Bitcoin Cash launch would be successful or not. After all, a fork of an existing blockchain is always cause for some concern. So far, though, none of the expected problems have occurred, even though the fork may have happened a bit earlier than originally anticipated. It seems all timers keeping track of the developments were off by a bit, but it did not impact either blockchain in a negative manner whatsoever.
Moreover, it seems most users have received their BCH as expected. We now have an official number of coins in circulation, which is not identical to the number of BTC currently available to users. The current supply is 16,482,113 BCH, according to CoinMarketCap. Bitcoin, on the other hand, has a circulating supply of 16,483,425.
This small discrepancy is nothing to worry about, as it appears the Bitcoin Cash blockchain is also slightly behind the core blockchain. Multiplying the number of “missing” blocks by the expected block reward produces the difference in supply. This delay in block heights is to be expected, as Bitcoin Cash enjoys a lot less mining support right now as compared to the original chain.
To be more specific, ViaBTC is only finding 25% of the Bitcoin Cash network blocks right now. That is somewhat strange, as it would seem that one individual miner is responsible for all other network blocks. A total of 13 blocks have been discovered since the fork took place, which is surprisingly low. Until more miners switch over to BCH, though, not much will change in this regard. There are multiple mining pools that support BCH right now, yet miners themselves aren’t too keen on switching over just yet.
The aspect of Bitcoin Cash that interests the most people is whether or not its price will hold up. It is evident there has been an initial market dump, although no one expected anything else. Most people saw BCH as “free money” and planned on selling at whatever price they could. In a lot of cases, that was around 0.05 Bitcoin per BCH. Right now, one BCH token is valued at 0.16 Bitcoin, which means people could have gotten three times as much money for their tokens by just waiting a few hours. Bittrex is the market leader in both volume and price right now, followed by Kraken and ViaBTC.
Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of this story is how Bitcoin Cash is currently the third largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization. We expected BCH to become one of the larger currencies when everything was said and done, but a top three spot had not exactly been anticipated. With a current market cap of US$7.2B, Bitcoin Cash is on track to remain well ahead of Ripple for now. Whether or not it can overtake Ethereum remains to be seen, as that gap is still quite large. It is impossible to tell what the future holds for BCH, but for now, things are looking pretty good.
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