Amaury’s attempt at an IFP is already making people want to sell their BCH.

Amaury’s attempt at an IFP is already making people want to sell their BCH.

BCH has survived the BCH-BTC split, the BCHABC-BCHSV split in a narrow sense but I’m having a hard time feeling too optimistic right now.

Three years after BCH forked off for the purposes of lifting the 1-MB block size limit, the median block size of this "big block" chain is about... 100 kb. (The then-undivided Bitcoin chain began consistently exceeding that level back in late 2012.)

And BCH is trading at a USD price the then-undivided Bitcoin chain first achieved back in 2013. And the price ratio to BTC is currently under 2.5%, an all-time low.

To quote Peter Rizun’s paraphrase of an analogy I shared with him:

I've also been feeling down about bitcoin since the hash war. Like /u/capt_roger_murdock said recently, between 2015 - 2017 bitcoin was a tree growing in a container too small for it to thrive. For over two years, we tried to move it to a larger pot without success. So we ended up taking a small cutting from the bitcoin tree and planting it in a much bigger pot. The little cutting admittedly looked kind of stupid in such a big pot, but with some watering and fertilizer we told ourselves that it would grow to fill that large container and more. But then just when the cutting was starting to establish some roots and to bud with new leaves, we decided to cut it in half, move each half to even bigger pots, and then trample and pee on both.

Being forced to fork off BTC as a rebranded minority chain did serious damage to BCH’s network effect, but with time I think it could have recovered. But then the messy BSV split did even more damage.

And then ABC’s disastrous leadership and IFP badluck did even more. I’m still hopeful that the bitcoin peer-to-peer electronic cash project that filled me with so much excitement back in 2012 will find a way to succeed.

But “optimistic”? That would probably be a stretch.