Tweet No. This is not an April Fool prank. Neither is it some sort of joke. At the moment, serious doom looms ahead for Bitcoin Cash. This is because the Lightning Network, a second layer solution proposed to solve Bitcoin scaling problem, is showing enough promise to make BCH obsolete in no time. – Advertisement – In August of 2017 when a section of the Bitcoin community forked the network to create Bitcoin Cash, the concern of experts in the field was that the scaling solution BCH offers isn’t sustainable. It was obvious that a blocksize increase, although bringing faster and cheaper transactions, will make people less interested in setting up nodes, as the blockchain will be heavier; as well as reducing the number of people able to afford to mine the coin.
These would lead to centralization of the coin and make it less secure. But the agitators went ahead with their plan. The also launched a series of attacks on Bitcoin, spending sweat and cash to bring it down and install Bitcoin Cash as the king of crypto. – Advertisement – However, it seems the chicken is coming home to roost. Good News For Bitcoin The Lightning Network, the other scaling solution which was harder (and slower) to achieve was launched early this year, howbeit, in a test phase.
A test net was provided where anyone can make use of the technology. But people ignored that test network and started using the new tech on the mainnet. That adoption is growing steadily. The number of nodes on the network has risen dramatically.
The LN had a measly 29 nodes in mid-January but at the moment there are over 1200 active nodes on the network with 3300+ channels. Bitcoin itself has a little under 11,000 nodes globally.
Bitcoin Cash has about 1500 active nodes. Node data count, among other things, is an important property of a crypto network because it could be a good measure of a network’s user base and its decentralization factor. In addition, the network has grown to over $61,000 with transaction fee size very negligible.
Furthermore, Lightning Labs, the startup tasked with the task of optimizing the Lightning Network for commercial use, recently launched 7 new Lightning applications (called LApps) to enable users to make micropayments with little or no fee. This LN adoption is very interesting, considering the fact that the technology is still in a test mode. People are already calling for LN to be fully launched on mainnet.
The belief is that everything will be complete by Q1 2018. When this happens, Bitcoin will be a very valuable asset to every being on the face of the earth. Bad News For Bitcoin Cash This development can only spell doom for Bitcoin Cash. It’s said that the currency will be obsolete once the LN arrives as its solution to scalability can’t compete with LN’s.
Apart from this, BCH has been on a slow decline. The August hard fork, which was once worth almost 20% of Bitcoin at the beginning of the year is now less than 10% of BTC.
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