Can BCH scale to fulfill the dream of Bitcoin this year?
In this post I asked if BCH could scale yet:
https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/ppxtz2/can_bch_scale_for_massive_worldwide_adoption/
The answers were yes's and no's. My takeaway from that thread was that BCH can not honestly tell the public we are ready to accept viral adoption and usage growth to world-size yet. Some may disagree and I look forward to the day when they convince me we can tell the public that BCH is ready to fulfill all the world's people's need for P2P cash.
Do we need to develop that ability before we need it?
I believe there is no higher priority than the ability to scale for massive worldwide adoption. Scaling is the only thing keeping us from being able to fulfill the dream of Bitcoin. We do not need it today, but we do need to be able to tell the public we are ready and able to fulfill the dream of Bitcoin.
If we can not claim to be ready to accept sudden viral growth, we will not have that happen. We will continue to grow slowly.
I believe the "wait until there is a need before growing our adoption potential" mindset is a mistake that has captured many of our biggest fans. I was a believer in that approach for years. Now, after years of BCH 'treading water' with slow adoption and price growth, I see that we are not growing adoption at a rate that is likely to allow BCH to be the project that fulfills the dream of Bitcoin.
Maybe I am wrong about all this, but if we don't plan to intentionally get things to the point where we can truthfully tell the public we are ready for viral growth to happen (like people thought could happen with BTC in it's best days), we are planning to wait for slow growth to get us to the dream of Bitcoin many years from now (in crypto years). Not only do I think that is unnecessary, I think it would mean there is a huge chance we would not get there before the public's need for p2p cash is fulfilled by some other service.
I think the public thought BTC would scale back in 2016. It started to go viral and then scaling was blocked. Had BTC raised the blocksize back then, it still could NOT have truly scaled to world-use size yet (like BCH still can't). Because the public had faith in BTC, I believe that it would have grown in value and use so much before BTC hit a real limit (maybe somewhere above 32MB back then?) developers would have solved the scaling issue in time to allow that growth to continue to even greater heights. Maybe developers would have solved scaling completely and it would have gone fully global and fulfilled the dream of Bitcoin.
Anyway, this is attempt 2.0. We don't want to mislead the public into thinking BCH can scale like BTC did since they already got burnt back then and have limited trust on that subject. We need to know how scaling can and will happen, then tell the public we are ready. If the public believes, I think an event will spark viral adoption growth and it is mostly downhill from there. But, we need to be able to handle the viral adoption so we can ask the public to climb aboard. Then we must not hit a ceiling (crash and lose all credibility) if they try to do so.
I share most of the ideals of the Bitcoin Cash community, but I am also a pragmatist when it comes to developments. There are two questions that I've seen being raised in the form of examples by commentators on your Reddit article.
And will this demand reach this size you express, or at least to an adequate percentage that would mean mass adoption?
And not only the cost counted in cash, but the cost to keep the network decentralized.
So these two together added will give us the outcome of sustainability. Will the miners/developers/users find profit from this? I'm sure that if mass adoption occurs there will be profit, but there could also be a high-risk undertaking when a network grows at levels of perhaps ten years ahead of its time.
Don't get me wrong, I hope that tomorrow the whole world suddenly changes its mind and just starts using cryptocurrencies and especially Bitcoin Cash. I keep writing and trying to convince anyone I know about crypto for years. Still, we are trying to push merchant adoption for too long but there have only been some clusters and regional initiatives but not huge growth, yet.
I'm sure if there are signs of high adoption levels, there could be a discussion and a plan. Maybe, I would agree with having a plan ready, perhaps with discussion with all sides to reach a consensus without any new problems and apply it, when the time is right.
[Edit]: After reading all the comments at Reddit, it seems that everyone is expressing the same view. Although, I'm not negative, and don't think that mass adoption is overrated as some BTC maximalists were telling earlier last year, I also think that there are steps taken towards this direction and in case mass adoption kicks the door the network will be ready to serve it.