Last week Bitcoin Cash completed a stress test, reaching 2.1 million transactions in a 24 hour window without a spike in fees. Controversial BCH proponent Roger Ver, however, tweeted about the high transaction throughput without mentioning the stress test, giving many the impression that usage of the network is considerably higher than is actually the case.
BTC vs BCH
The issue of Bitcoin versus Bitcoin Cash is still an inflammatory subject, with many BTC proponents calling BCH a scam, while BCH supporters continue to claim they are the ‘true’ Bitcoin.
As discussed previously on blockchainreporter, there is no objective answer based on the tech as to which blockchain is the ‘true’ inheritor of Satoshi’s vision, since neither version of the chain uses only code that Satoshi had any input on. Instead some judgement must be made based on the opinion of community that uses the coins, whether that be economic or popular support.
And that comes into play with what happened with last week’s stress test. All issues about the Lightning Network and block size aside, since the fork last August the economic majority of the crypto community, as well as the miners, have primarily chosen to use BTC, and to think of it as the true Bitcoin.
Roger Ver however tweeted out that Bitcoin Cash was responsible for the majority of all crypto transactions during a 24 hour period. And that was… technically true. But the tweet he sent out forgot to mention the little detail that very nearly all of those transactions were made as part of a stress test to measure how high of a throughput the BCH network could handle without a spike in fees.
This left a bitter taste in the mouth of many observers, as Ver came across as trying to pretend BCH saw more ‘real’ use than BTC.
In the last 24 hours Bitcoin Cash had more transactions than all other cryptocurrencies combined.https://t.co/6EeRmpfaH7 pic.twitter.com/vvZfbZHZn1
— Roger Ver (@rogerkver) September 3, 2018
Potential vs Realized Traffic
At the moment, Bitcoin sees about 210,000 transactions per day. That is, indeed, much less than the 2 million transactions processed on the BCH blockchain during a 24 hour window last week, however once the stress test ended the BCH network quickly returned to its normal traffic of ~20,000 transactions per day.
It is very fair and valid to point out that BCH is currently better able to handle high transaction throughput than BTC, and the Bitcoin Cash community have reason to be pleased with the successful stress test performed last week. But in the broader crypto community, the true Bitcoin is still BTC as a matter of settled public opinion, and Roger Ver is not doing his community any favors by making tweets that are, at best, easily misunderstood.
