"eCash" is the new name of the recent (BCHABC) fork of Bitcoin Cash run by the guy who was arguably the BCH lead developer before he tried to get funding for BCH developers from the mining rewards. He did a bad job of rolling out the idea and decided to give himself control of the funding. The idea was rejected by the social-media-community, but he went ahead with it anyway creating a new fork. Many on social media have a lot of hatred for him and his coin. The value of the new coin was around 12 - 30 USD each for a while in early 2021.
The coin recently "rebranded" as eCash (XEC) and moved the decimal over making the coin-value very low (if one was worth 30 USD at the redenomination, one would then be worth 0.00003000 USD) and the math easier for users to comprehend (it is now like dollars and cents). One of their theories is low value coins can rise with greater percentage gains under bull-market conditions. As I write this there is significant price growth happening (as other coins have fallen). To me this suggests some of the money taken out of other coins is being used to pump it up (one XEC is about 0.00004317 USD each as I write this). I believe it is vulnerable to good and bad price manipulations.
IMO, the first BCH to develop massive world-sized scaling will have a real chance to fulfill the dream of Bitcoin and leave ALL other Bitcoin forks in the dust. I believe BCH and XEC are the only serious contenders working to fulfill that dream. I do not think either is well funded enough to pay developers to make it happen, so it looks like we may find out which team has the best volunteer efforts directed at that goal.
BCH development tends to be careful and both community- and peer-reviewed. BCH most-likely has more community support, better coin value and better developer support. It has multiple implementation teams working to make BCH number one in the world. It should be able to develop scaling first if they prioritize that goal. I hope they do. If scaling requires radical change, they may be slow implementing it after disclosing the technical strategy of it to the world.
eCash is basically run by a dictator who gets to make all the big decisions and can do radical things like changing the name and moving the decimal place. It is smaller and most-likely less well funded and has little community support. It seems to me the developers are still working to fulfill the dream of bitcoin quietly and with only limited efforts to satisfy the desires of the social media "circus". Having faith in this team is a leap because they are not making much effort to prove themselves along the way.
In theory, concentrating on developing is what eCash should be doing. If they solve scaling and it requires radical change, they can spring it on the world as an update quickly and without much warning to competitors. If BCH developers solve the scaling dilemma and begin to discuss their intentions, eCash can probably adapt their idea and get to market with it much faster. I believe BCH would still be better situated to fulfill the dream of Bitcoin if they are not too slow about it.
My hopes are high for at least one of these coins fulfilling the dream of Bitcoin: censorship resistant (sufficiently decentralized) peer-to-peer electronic cash for the world's people.
Like all of crypto, I see "investing" in either as a gamble (with BCH as the "blue chip" gamble and eCash is the "penny stock" gamble). If either succeeds, they should grow more used and more valuable than BTC will ever be (due to BTC's apparent intentional failure to scale). It appears BTC is likely to stay on top of all the forks until one fork can scale for massive worldwide daily use and goes viral. Until then, all the coin prices seem to be controlled by the speculators and market manipulators.
Lead photo and article (c) Big Bubbler 2021
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