The Bitcoin Cash (BCH) chain often advertises how it can upgrade using hard forks (usually indicating how easy it is).
It sounds all well, but in order to do this, you must have centralized control over the chain such that these hard forks can be pushed down to all clients. If clients (i.e. miners) don't upgrade their code, then they will be working on the old chain while everyone else moves on.
With centralization comes risk. The risk that a person or entity in control can act in a way that is not a consensus decision. This is exactly the risk that has materialized on BCH.
Amaury Séchet is the lead developer of Bitcoin ABC (the reference implementation for BCH). He announced that in November 2020 there will be an upgrade on BCH.
He plans to try another "fix" for the BCH difficulty adjustment algorithm (DAA) which by the way suffers from low hashpower in comparison to BTC - and miners "gaming" the chain. I'm not going to comment on the issues with the DAA here - the second change is the real point of issue.
The second improvement is the addition of a new Coinbase Rule.
How can the coinbase rule be "improved" you ask?
The Coinbase Rule improvement is as follows: All newly mined blocks must contain an output assigning 8% of the newly mined coins to a specified address.
And who owns that address? - yes, the developers (Amaury). Basically, they are taxing each new block with an 8% tax rate.
Ask yourself - how can this be the consensus. Well, it isn't. And I hope it is clear at this point that BCH is NOT a decentralized currency.
Does this sound like Bitcoin to you?
In case of the tax, very simple solution just don't mine the supposed upgraded chain, and let it be 2 chains, one supports the tax the other doesn't, very simple, centralization my ass, at least you can choose if you want tax or not.
Guess what, I think people will go for the tax so that they can pay development, in the case of Bitcoin, they didn't tax the mining Bitcoin just gave up on trying to be a currency and instead decided to be MoneyGram Lightning Network which is not a currency just a money sending service.
Lightning Network means two onchain transaction fees plus routing fees on top, you can't be a currency with three fees, the best you can hope to be is Western Union. Not to mention you are not private whatsoever.
Bitcoin Cash will charge you a tax, Bitcoin sold out to governments and corporations and gave P2P, that's a hell of price to pay for development, I rather pay 8% than give up peer to peer currency.
By to way I have been using Western Union Lightning Network because to not pay the opening and closing of channels I have been forced to use wallets like Phoenix and wallet of satoshi.
And many other will continue to use lightning this way just to not pay onchain fees and many are starting to think using wallets like that is actually using Bitcoin which is not it is just another PayPal account.
At Phoenix Wallet, you have to pay a fee because it's a non-custodial wallet. And what you can do is:
- Abandon Bitcoin
- Promote Lightning to keep onchain fees as low as possible
- Recommended for fee reduction solutions on the first layer like SegWit, Schnorr, Taproot.
BCH will not allow itself to split, because it would be dead.
I don't care what happens to Bitcoin Cash, for all I care all Bitcoin direct forks should die, just like Bitcoin will. The moment Bitcoin dies, I don't want a fork to say we are the new Bitcoin, I want anyone that holds Bitcoin or any fork to lose their money for forgetting what was supposed a peer to peer currency.
All fiat will start experiencing hyperinflation, and when people try to use Bitcoin to scape hyperinflation than they will realize Bitcoin is not a currency and the price will dump. People will not go to Bitcoin just to hold it at some point they will want to use it, but in a hyperinflation world usage will be so big that tx fees will go so high that people will dump it.
And lightning network will mean double the fees, not to mention custodian wallets may 3ven get a letter saying please give us this and that user funds because we are the government, and since the only way to pay less tx fees is to use custodian wallets, pretty soon people will realize they are using PayPal Lightning Network account when their custodian wallet overlords tell them that the government has ask for their funds and as such they can go and suck a dick for not owning their own keys.
Bitcoin not being a peer to peer currency will only come to light once people try to use it as such, and it will be when people will want to use it the most as a p2p CURRENCY but it will be when they realize they got fuck.
Hyperinflation in fiat currency will show the importance of peer to peer currency with low fees, but if you haven't cash out into something else by that time, you won't even have the possibility to dump because the network will be stuck with higher and higher tx cost.
You don't need to be that smart to realize high transaction fees will be the end of Bitcoin in a hyperinflation world.
Bitcoin is no ordinary cryptocurrency - thousands of developers, millions of users and a very large adoption (for a crypto) make it the largest project in the world.