Busting The Myth: BTC Is More Secure Than BCH

The debate and comparison of bitcoin and bitcoin cash is as old as bitcoin cash itself. But to fully do justice to any such debate or comparison, one would need to know the history of how bitcoin cash came to be.

Bitcoin Cash came as a result of a hard fork of the original Bitcoin blockchain. This happened on On August 1st, 2017, when some members and developers of the bitcoin community whom didn't agree with the other faction on how to solve the scalibilty issues that bitcoin had decided to go it alone.

They basically updated codes of their nodes, which were originally BTC nodes. This effectively resulted in the creation of a new blockchain and a new coin called BCH and everybody who had BCH then, got the equivalent amount in BCH, lucky them eh, that's twice their investment 😂😂.

The group that would later perform this hard fork had argued for an increase in the block size of BTC, so as to accommodate more transactions. This would in effect reduces the congestion of the network as well as the fee paid my users, and also increase it's availability. The other group refused on grounds that it was a deviation from BTC original founder's vision. This idea would result in the blockchain been less secure.

Why I Disagree

For starters, it was found in some of satoshi's writings that he suggested the increase in the size of the blocks at some point. If it were to be detrimental to the security of the network or if it was a deviation from his goal, he wouldn't have done so. This alone is enough argument for why BTC is by no means more secure than BCH, but let's not leave at that, right? Let's address every possible angle from which the argument has been made ever

1. Bitcoin Cash is less secure than Bitcoin because it has fewer miners: At first glance, this might actually sound reasonable and correct, but I bet you it's not really when you understand the basics of the blockchain.

Now, here's a misconception people have about the blockchain that fuels this argument. A lot of people think the network works in such a way that every mining node is tasked to do a certain job that's unique to it, same with others, that when all these are put together, makes the blockchain what it is, but this isn't so. Whether there are two miners or two million miners, they all basically do the same thing.

They aren't dividing the labour, rather they are duplicating it. Everybody is doing what every other person is actually doing. Hence, if we are two or two million, it doesn't really make any real difference. The only difference it makes is that we have two copies, they have two million copies. That in itself doesn't really contribute to security of the network per se. As far as this point goes, none leads the other.

2. Bitcoin has a higher hashpower: Ok, this one is tricky. It is very true that bitcoin has a higher hashpower, but we shouldn't forget that most of what constitutes bitcoin cash hashpower today was originally part of bitcoin's hashpower. Bitcoin cash is relatively younger than bitcoin, hence it's totally normal that this would be so. The disparity in hashpower between both has nothing to do with confidence in bitcoin but rather on monetary gain, as it is more profitable to mine bitcoin today than it is to mine BCH.

As the reward for mining BTC continue to reduce via halving, it will become more and more less profitable for miners and small scale miners will either have to leave or switch to BCH. What does that do for the hashpower now, huh? This is something we're already seeing even today and will continue into the future, so I totally think it's a matter of time, as BCH miners have never made a secret of their intentions to ramp up the hashpower.

BCH has seen quite a number of attack over the years, none has been successful so far, except for one that occurred in 2018 when a toxic block was accepted into blockchain due to a bug, but bitcoin also did have a bitter day when it was even already older than BTC when due to a bug also, someone created 92 billion BTC. If you ask me, I'd say BTC had it worse😂😂.

3. BTC is decentralized unlike BCH: People argue that BTC has tens of thousands of active mining nodes which dwarfs that of BCH, and this is true, hence they presume this endows BTC the decentralization that Satoshi aimed for unlike BCH, but this one is just outright laughable, as data accumulate over the years have shown this to not be true .

To truly get the picture, it's important we look at how mining work. Miners do not just set up their hardware to do jargon calculations and hope to catch a block once in every few years, rather they work in group called pools. These pools have a sharing agreement, whereby every block and transaction reward earned is shared amongst the mining nodes in the pool.

More than 65% of the entire BTC mining nodes are concentrated in one country, and not a very democratic and law-abiding one at that (China). As if that is not enough, more than 50% of the total hashrate is is in the hand of just four pools. This is mostly also true for BCH, hence BTC had no edge here.

Making A case For Bitcoin Cash

I don't want to make this article too lengthy, so I'm just going to summarily make a case for bitcoin cash with these few points.

1. Bitcoin cash by far give more feeling of security to users due to it fast transaction time which cannot possibly exceed ten minutes, unlike BTC which takes around 60 minutes on average and up to seven days even.

2. Bitcoin cash removal of the replace-by-fee feature greatly increases it security over that of BTC where the possibility of replacing by fee and the slow transaction time creates room for double spending for those who really want to exploit it.

3. Over time, bitcoin will become less profitable to mine and will force miners to leave the network and probably port to BCH.

4. The BCH core team is by far more responsive to bringing solution to the network. They also interact with the community and ensure the community are the ultimate development team. This can not be said of the BTC core team which seem to never be able to agree on how to do anything for the network, hence is far less present and responsive to the development of BTC.

This definitely makes the BCH network more secure and more positioned to be the crypto of the future as against BTC. A case in point is that the problem of scalabilty is what caused the hard fork ThSt face birth to BCH, and while the BCH core team has made the blockchain, carry out several improvement, as well as brought the smart contract (smartBCH), the BTC core team is yet to really solve the scalibilty issue of BTC after all these years.

5. Another thing that everybody is not talking about is the possibility of exposing the BTC network to vulnerabilities and attacks due to overworking of the network infrastructures which is a thing we are already seeing today. BCH do not have to worry about this, due to higher scalibilty.

Conclusion

While BTC is already at its peak in many ways and seem to be about to start experiencing diminishing return, BCH is still growing and as such will become more secure and better with time, but what do I know, right??

This is my entry for The MythBusting 2021 World Challenge by @SofiaCBCH

smartBCH address:

0x3638934a291967FEf03B9FDA18a7A726760df0eC

SLP address :

simpleledger:qqu6nj27j4ea2egzz80mku70s96r75w9jycgaresg5

BCH address:

bitcoincash:qqu6nj27j4ea2egzz80mku70s96r75w9jy5nkcvsk2

Thanks for reading.