Most people rightly proclaim value in white papers, technical details and systems. All of these are valuable, but they are also able to be adapted to by rival currencies.
BTC vs BCH
Most in BCH don't perceive BTC as a threat to BCH value, since they believe that BTC will always be non-competitive in the currency space. Currently, that's true. The issue is with the perception of 'never'. I do not mean 'solutions' like the Lightning network, either. The issue is BTC's social capital.
As the investment in BTC grows, there's a threat of business and retail investors influencing the development of the coin to revisit issues that kill its value. Discussions by BTC influencers about block size and making BTC a currency could threaten BCH.
Feasibility of Change
So just how feasible is BTC reviving this conversation? Isn't the media propaganda that BTC's high fees is a feature and not a bug? Didn't Blockstream take it over and plan to kill it?
Everyone involved in cryptocurrency should know that competition causes adaptation. If BCH begins to consume BTC market capital, threatening to outclass BTC, the pressure from new investors to save their funds could push BTC into competing in the currency space.
The key to competing in such conditions is selling vision.
How To Sell Vision
So in the crypto space, what does selling vision look like? It should not focus on the negative of other coins but the positives of itself. Reputation and wisdom is how you sell vision. One of the key focuses should be selling the development team of BCH and its consistent values, reputation and productive discourse on steering development to where it is going and is today.
The appeal to public would be the consistent track record of putting scalability before redundancy. That it owns the initial vision of Bitcoin and carries it forward into the future. That there is more ideological and reputational consistency in the influencers of BCH's direction. This will be especially important while BCH does not yet have top market capital - and leading up to that.
Emphasis
It needs to be emphasized that making barriers to entry into development too low, having no consistent developer vision on the needs for scalability and having opaque or hidden paths to learning about BCH will obstruct the adoption of BCH. Vision means looking ten years ahead, even if adoption is a focus right now, vision is not disconnected from generating adoption itself.
Solutions
I think some positive developments would be transparent developer meetings on the standards of what is or is not acceptable values for BCH code, and onboarding processes with outlines of values as well would be positive. For example, an agreement to not reduce or stagnate block size (against certain criteria) or other issues agreed upon, would signal to the world "we are, were and we will be consistent".
Final Thoughts
There have been multiple positive developments recently on this front ( such as the website whybitcoincash.com ). I am not at all solemn about the future of BCH, instead I advise prudence about upcoming potential challenges, and preparing before they're a reality.
Great analysis