Bitcoin Cash is Making Strides and I'm Optimistic for the Future
The Bitcoin Cash community has been making strides lately and it’s only getting better.
Cash on Mobile Payments
After spending years in development, cash on mobile payments (or mobile money) has gone mainstream. In Kenya, for example, a recent study by PayPal found that 45% of Kenyans use M-Pesa to pay their bills. As of 2017, nearly half of all M-Pesa users were under 25 years old. And as in other countries with high cash usage rates, most Kenyans who used M-Pesa to pay their bills reported they did so because they didn't have a bank account or enough funds in their existing accounts to cover them. They also said they chose not to use a bank because it was too difficult or inconvenient to get an account there – thus saving mobile money from having an adverse effect on banks' bottom lines.
Lower Fees are Life-Changing
One of Bitcoin Cash’s biggest selling points is its low transaction fees. In most cases, Bitcoin transactions will set you back between $3-$5 each. For example, in November 2017, median fees on blocks were over $35 with an average fee of nearly $37. Meanwhile, on December 1st of that same year, median fees were around just under $0.17 while averages came in at around $0.19 a piece.
Decentralized Applications Empower People
The world has never been more economically connected than it is today. With communications technology, barriers to trade are gone. The Internet gives us access to millions of people, information, goods, services, and opportunities. It’s a game-changer—the biggest ever change in human history. But there’s one area where we haven’t seen much progress: finance. Finance isn’t helping people connect.
Zero Confirmation Transactions
Bitcoin Cash was launched with a set of rules that allow transactions to be confirmed without having to wait for confirmations. In Bitcoin, a single confirmation can take up to an hour. That's too long when you're spending $100 on dinner with friends. Most other cryptocurrencies have faster confirmation times than Bitcoin, but none offer zero-confirmation transactions. ZC Transactions enable you to start using your bitcoins within seconds of receiving them. No one can double-spend your coins because there's no window between sending and receiving in which they could be duplicated by a bad actor. And as always, ZC Transactions are still subject to standard confirmations if there's any risk of fraud or theft.
The Roadmap Has Big Events Coming Soon
There’s a lot of excitement in the Bitcoin Cash community about an upcoming code upgrade called Schnorr signatures. If you use Bitcoin often, you might be wondering what that means—but it could potentially have major implications for cryptocurrency adoption. In layman's terms, Schnorr signatures are a clever way to condense all of your transactions into one space (rather than several different places) on each blockchain. That makes it easier to process your transaction through a single database as opposed to multiple blockchains. In addition, because there’s only one place on each chain with all of your info, it also provides privacy protections by protecting information like IP addresses or private keys. As explained on CoinDesk