Like all good bitcoin holders should do, I have taken ownership of my free BCH and locked it up nice and tight. If you were holding Bitcoin when Bitcoin Cash forked, then you got it entirely free. Free money. Who doesn't love that?
I was tempted in the early days to sell immediately in case BCH disappeared overnight. Maybe get 300 or 400 dollars for my effort. But I decided to hold on to it.
Over the last few days, money has been pouring into BCH. And it has driven up the price over $1,000.
It has also caused an enormous amount of Bitcoin miners to switch their mining to Bitcoin Cash.
The change has been quite abrupt. And it has caused a ripple effect.
Because, as the computer farms stopped mining Bitcoin, the bitcoin network was naturally slowed down. The impact of that by itself might have been negligible. But simultaneously, it seems that the bitcoin blockchain has been overwhelmed with a large amount of transactions. And many speculate that it is spam.
All these parts worked together to arrive at a nightmare scenario for Bitcoin. The sudden fluctuation in price and transaction times was extreme. This had many of us worried.
My friend @xtrodinarypilot wrote about his experience with being unable to even send even $48 of BTC directly and having to use a $30 work around.
But the price of Bitcoin is now looking like it is in recovery. We shall see what happens from here. BCH is holding steady well above $1000 at the moment - much higher than ever before.
So this brings me to why I considered selling my BCH.
You see, us crypto enthusiasts are more realistic in our view of humanity. We tend to know what a bad actor is capable of.
So some people are seeing a pattern in this particular set of events.
- BCH floods with new cash.
- Miners quickly moving in droves to BCH.
- The "flippening" when BCH has more computing power than BTC, happens seemingly overnight.
- BTC is flooded with a higher volume of transactions that are possibly spam.
The question we're left with is - were there bad actors involved?
And if so, why are they betting so much on Bitcoin Cash? This is a gigantic investment for whoever might be behind it. The market cap of Bitcoin cash grew 30 billion dollars in 4 days, capping out at 40 Billion before dropping closer to 20 Billion. The market has doubled in a couple days.
Could a social media post or a viral video have driven that kind of growth organically? Was it mentioned on the Big Bang Theory or something?
No, no. I keep my ear to the ground when it comes to crypto. (And apparently a Big Bang episode about Bitcoin is on its way). Just my humble opinion, but my gut tells me that this 30 billion dollar jump was a deliberate effort by someone or several someones with a lot of financial pull.
And my gut also says that if you're laying down that kind of cash, you might just feel okay with sabotaging the competition too, maybe by the bitcoin equivalent of DDOS - flooding the network with meaningless transactions.
And if that's true, perhaps you have more nefarious plans for BCH in the future. Maybe these plans will not have my best interests in mind. Maybe the people who post doom-and-gloom predictions for BCH were right.
So that's what led me here. I was planning to pull my BCH and split the money between SWT and IOTA.
But I did some research this morning and have arrived at my conclusion. I'm keeping my BCH.
I figure that these manipulative actors could be wholly uninvolved with the projects - just manipulating the market for their own benefit. It's not necessarily a scam coin or run by scammers. BCH might have been just as much a victim of this as anyone.
Today, as I did some research, I came across this article which lays out some of the vision for BCH and covers the arguments on both sides. After reading it, I decided that BCH could be destined for greatness. And if so, I don't want to miss out on it.
So I decided to ride it out. Was that a good idea or a bad idea? Tell me your thoughts in the comments.
DISCLAIMER I'm not a financial professional or anything like that. So do your own research and assume that I stand to profit from you investing in anything I talk about. Also, these types of paternalistic disclaimers would not be necessary in a Voluntarist society.