The Poloniex exchange recently announced that it will finally enable BCH withdrawals on Monday. BreadWallet, the popular Bitcoin iOS wallet, will also support BCH transactions moving forward. It will be interesting to see how things play out for Bitcoin Cash, since there is still a lot of negative animosity toward this project.
Bitcoin Cash Ecosystem Slowly Maturing
It is good to see support for Bitcoin Cash growing, even though there are still people who feel it to be an abomination. The process of forking off the main Bitcoin blockchain was rather peaceful, though, and there is no real reason for any continued bad blood between the communities. However, it is perhaps difficult to see two currencies utilizing near-identical code bases and similar names, and to not expect some degree of animosity to exist. Bitcoin Cash is an altcoin for now, and no one should have any problem calling it one.
Whether BCH becomes the longer blockchain of the two remains to be seen. The SegWit2x fork, potentially taking place this November, remains a point of contention. Some people feel this will be less of an issue as the Core developers have been making life difficult for supporters of SegWit2x. The upcoming Core Client 0.15.0 will cut off SegWit2x nodes from the main blockchain altogether. This will likely exacerbate the tensions and lead to another Bitcoin blockchain fork, which could have major repercussions for the network as a whole.
The decision to simply reject SegWit2x now that Segregated Witness activity has locked in should not surprise anyone. Everybody knew the support for SegWit2x from most Bitcoin Core supporters was simply a means to an end. SegWit will activate regardless, but the potential increase to 2MB blocks will not be supported by Core. However, the rejection of SegWit2x has already caused a fair bit of controversy.
Some of the world’s largest mining pools support SegWit2x specifically and may not necessarily back down from that concept anytime soon. Though it would make economic sense for them to do so, this “war of scaling solutions” has been going on for quite some time now. If the mining pools really wanted to drive a point home, they would stick with SegWit2x and move their hashpower to the new chain when the November split occurs. At that point things would look pretty bleak for Bitcoin Core. Do keep in mind this is all mere speculation and the end result may be very different from the way things look right now.
On the positive side for Bitcoin Cash, Poloniex will finally enable BCH withdrawals tomorrow. It is unclear what repercussions this will have on the young cryptocurrency. It is possible we will see a BCH trading market in the future as well, although there is still no official word on that. A Poloniex trading market for Bitcoin Cash would be more than welcome, even though we do not advise that users store funds in exchange wallets for longer than absolutely necessary.
BCH support is also coming to the iOS BreadWallet app. Many iOS users utilize this wallet due to its elegance and powerful features. The integration of Bitcoin Cash is a major milestone for the community. Having more wallet support — especially in the mobile department — can only be seen as a good thing. Things are finally coming together for Bitcoin Cash.
