Bitcoin : Why I choose Bitcoin Cash over Bitcoin
A [few days ago I posted my doubts and criticism about BTC vs BCH](https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/9343tx/honest_criticism_of_btc_bch/), but now I have made my mind up after a lenghty research yesterday and today, I have chosen BCH.
**Disclaimer: I have already owned BCH before that.**
So I was already on board BCH, but I had my doubts about it, and certainly the noise the other side makes, it made me doubt myself whether I made the best choice or not. After all it’s about money, and the first thing that comes into a person’s mind is that it worries about losing it. So if BCH would have been inferior to BTC then there would have been a strong chance of losing that money, through the price doing down like with the other fake coins Bitcoin Gold, Bitcoin Diamond, etc…
Because from an investment standpoint I shouldn’t care about sides, I just want the one that has a better future and more potential in it. So if I would have found out that BTC is better I would have sold my BCH for BTC obviously, I would have no sentimental attachment to either of them, I just want to be on the right side. Eventually hedge, but hedging is like the game of uncertain people, and there is no uncertainty here, all the evidence shows one side to be much better than the other. It’s not even like 70-30, it’s more like 99-1.
Now I did a lenghty research, read all the comments on my posts, and compared them to the claim BTC makes on their websites and influential BTC people have stated, asked questions, used logic, and it’s now objectively clear to me that BCH is the right side to be on.
# FEES
I was already doubtful about BTC, that is why I have switched to BCH about a year ago, I saw their shady activities, but the final nail in the coffin was probably the massive FEE problem, that [started last November and ended in February](https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-transactionfees.html). That made me totally dislike BTC.
However now that the fees are normal in BTC, I had a doubt in my mind that what if they are right? What if the fee spike was just a coordinated attack on BTC, and now that it’s over, BTC is just as good as BCH.
I mean if the fees are normal now, and about the same last I looked (maybe BTC is like 20% more expensive but still low like 60 cents), it gives some credibility back to BTC.
There are theories that the coordinated attack was a conspiracy against BTC, but then again BTC has it’s own conspiracies too, so why not just ignore the conspiracy theories and look at the facts.
The fact is that it doesn’t matter what it was, the mere fact that it happened, and it crippled the network for 4 months, shows that BTC has serious flaws. And it can happen again. So it doesn’t matter who did it, it happened, and the network was crippled.
Now if a network can be crippled like that, and if you want this network to host a global payment system, then we will have huge problems.
BCH can defend against such attack much more effectively because it costs more to fill up a 32MB block than a 1MB block, 32x harder. Plus a 32MB block is so small that anyone can handle that right now, even if a 4 month period attack would happen against BCH, and it would be 32x more costly, so it would be harder to pull off.
However if a bigger budgeted attacker would attack again BTC with a 32x budget, then it would cripple BTC for 10 YEARS!!! That would literally make Bitcoin literally die.
# Non Mining Nodes
One aspect that the BTC people say is that non miner “full nodes” are sacrosanct, and that we need them to keep miners in check, but I haven’t heard any coherent answers as to why.
I have read the whitepaper twice, once today and once yesterday, and it states there clearly what the real truth is. You should definitely download and archive the whitepaper because some people tried to rewrite it, Orwellian style, so grab the original one here:
https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/whitepaper
[Download it and save it on your own computer SHA256: **b1674191a88ec5cdd733e4240a81803105dc412d6c6708d53ab94fc248f4f553**, these Orwellian trolls might try to gaslight you eventually and rewrite the past!]
The whitepaper mentions 3 times that:
> The system is secure as long as honest nodes collectively control more CPU power than any
cooperating group of attacker nodes.
Subsequently:
> The proof-of-work also solves the problem of determining representation in majority decision
making. If the majority were based on one-IP-address-one-vote, it could be subverted by anyone
able to allocate many IPs. Proof-of-work is essentially one-CPU-one-vote. The majority
decision is represented by the longest chain, which has the greatest proof-of-work effort invested
in it. If a majority of CPU power is controlled by honest nodes, the honest chain will grow the
fastest and outpace any competing chains.
This is word for word how the whitepaper says it. So this alone disproves the full node myth, it’s complete nonsense. The miners have total control, and the nodes don’t matter. Satoshi designed a 1 CPU 1 vote system, where every node is a miner node. He could not forecast large farm ASIC miners, but then again that isn’t resolved by just running non miner nodes.
Furthermore the full node system doesn’t have any collective benefit only individual one, which we will get into next, and it might even be a drag:
Instead of going from **A->D**, you have to go to **A->B->C->D** with a full node system, adding extra inefficiency and latency. Keep in mind, this is not a medieval pidgeon relay messaging system, the information travels at the speed of light, so there is no need for extra relays, in fact adding extra relays just creates extra latency.
You eventually have to communicate with a miner, so what is the point in having extra “bus stops” along the way? It’s just a waste of resources.
We do need many miners to secure the network, and instead of wasting resources on non-mining nodes, they should just spend that on mining if they really want decentralization.
# SPV Wallets
Another claim that they make is that SPV wallets are insecure. Which is somewhat true, but out of perspective. For general users SPV wallets are totally fine. And I don’t think SPV security is lower than what anyone except a billionaire who keeps all his coins in 1 address (very stupid) would need.
This explained well in the whitepaper in the **page 5/ paragraph 8 “Simplified Payment Verification”** section. The SPV is probabilistically secure, because it fetches blocks that are already agreed upon, so unless a big conspiracy is taking place, miners rewriting the chain, this gives people a probabilistic security.
Most SPV wallets are well implemented so they use the best tools to keep your coin history reasonably accurate, so they fetch data from multiple random servers and compare against it. Certainly Electrum/Electron Cash does this well.
One thing I might add is that it’s good to use a **VPN** too with SPV wallets, in case your are personally targeted by a criminal, so your IP address is randomized too for extra security, so you won’t download honeypot blocks that are specifically targeting your IP.
But other than that SPV is just reasonably secure, and by that I mean that it’s probably below 0.1% that your coin history can be deceitful, and even then if you wait for 10-15 confirmations and shuffle your VPN IP address around enough times, you can be absolutely sure that the history is accurate.
So their fear is overblown and they are just fearmongering on this, the same way people fearmonger about asteroid impact or alien invasion, it’s just not reasonable.
# Lightning Network
Now as you can see already that a lot of these claims have been utterly debunked, and they don’t have coherent arguments to address the rebuttals, in fact in most cases they resort to ad hominems and insults (which I have experienced, just for asking questions). But the **coup de grace** happens when you realize how inefficient LN is. And for that here are some references, it’s mostly technical:
* https://medium.com/@jonaldfyookball/mathematical-proof-that-the-lightning-network-cannot-be-a-decentralized-bitcoin-scaling-solution-1b8147650800
* https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/8zyr77/lightning_network_is_a_bottleneck_for_development/
And perhaps it’s explained in more simpler terms in youtube videos but the point is that there is real scientific proof that the LN will have awful consequences for the decentralization of BTC, and it inserts and unnecessary middleman into the mix that is a massive point of failure.
It essentially creates a KYC regulated bank network on top of a settlement layer, and the governments around the world will have total control over that. Well the LN nodes are essentially money transmitters because they directly facilitate the transfer of money, so AML/KYC/Tax reporting/Surveillance will happen by default on these nodes. And given that LN can’t be a decentralized system but a hub & spoke system, due to the need to keep your wallet online at all times, it will literally become a 3rd party custodian based banking system, literally.
So all of the essence of Bitcoin [word for word quote from the whitepaper]:
> A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution.
Will literally cease to exist, and it reverts BTC back into a government regulated banking system, literally.
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There are other arguments too, but these are the main ones, and researching them thoroughly and understanding the issues made me lose all my doubts about Bitcoin Cash and all my faith in Bitcoin.
It can’t be any more clear to me now that Bitcoin Cash is the true version of Bitcoin, the real vision of Satoshi and the genuine implementation of it, with all the technical genius-ity that Satoshi had laid out in the whitepaper which is still relevant.
Satoshi laid out everything in the whitepaper, and all of it is implemented geniusly in Bitcoin Cash except for **paragraph 7 on page 4 “Reclaiming Disk Space”** which talks about block pruning, I am not sure if this is **Xthin Blocks** or **Compact Blocks** or **Thin Blocks** (please explain in the comment section), otherwise it should be implemented, it would be a much better way for scaling than LN.
But other than that BCH is technically superior. Now I don’t know whether better things win in politics, but in engineering, if your design is shitty, it will inevitably fall apart. You can’t have a skyscraper built on quicksand, it’s inevitable disaster.
So look, BCH is obviously risky, it has less users, less merchants; but because it has a solid foundation and probably the 3rd biggest community after ethereum, it has maaaaaaaaaaaaassive opportunity in it to become the best cryptocurrency (because ethereum has the same or worse issues than BTC).
There is no question now whether BCH is better, the only question now is, how long will it take for people to realize this.
**So I choose to stay with BCH, and now I am 101% supportive of it! Long Live Bitcoin Cash!!**
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Author: alexander7k
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