The word “Bitcoin” seems to be on everyone’s lips in the last year thanks to its meteoric rise. Yet, what is Bitcoin and why is the word often combined with other nouns like “cash” and “gold”?
This is because the original Bitcoin network has undergone many upgrades and alterations throughout its 12 years of existence, which has resulted in several offspring chains — all but one imposters according to Bitcoin maximalists — thriving in the crypto ecosystem.
Three major implementations — Bitcoin (BTC), Bitcoin Cash (BCH) and Bitcoin Satoshi’s Vision (BSV) — have been competing for dominance since 2017.
While the three coins have some general similarities, since they were borne out of the same network, they are also very different from each other, as they share different objectives.
Where Bitcoin is now universally considered to be rather a store of value than a payment network (at least presently) due to its slow transaction speed limitations, the others position themselves as digital currencies for everyday use, thanks to their larger block size.
Bitcoin Cash’s contentious original hard fork from Bitcoin in 2017 kicked off years of discord and open hostilities between the proponents of each cryptocurrency, each proclaiming to be the “true Bitcoin,” aka the one closest to BTC creator Satoshi Nakamoto’s original vision.
To provide an objective assessment of each asset’s theoretical case for the crown (although Bitcoin’s dominance, mass adoption and price increase has for all purposes rendered this a moot point and ended any chances of a flippening ever happening), we must individually compare BTC, BCH and BSV by looking deeper into the nuances in each platform, such as fees, transaction speed, adoption rate among others.