At the end of the day, it is not fancy bells and whistles that make crypto valuable to the masses, but utility and ease in payments. BCH has a whole lot going for it in this direction.
Saleability Involves...Sales
In recent articles I detailed why market saleability of an asset, good, or commodity is the central prerequisite for said asset's adoption as money. You can find those articles here and here.
It may not seem very sexy or sophisticated at first, but this simple, fundamental utility –to be able to freely, readily, and permissionlessly use a currency for payments is the bedrock of bitcoin. Without fast and easy payments, there is no SoV status, no innovation in payment processing, and no real reason to expect adoption.
In another article here on Read, I reminisced about a trip to Tokyo in 2016 when I was able to buy beer with BTC, and use the convenient and rapidly proliferating ATMs prior to the Japanese FSA's imposition of more stringent regulations on crypto, and prior to BTC's skyrocketing tx fees and network congestion.
Money Must Flow
A simple law of nature: rivers must flow down into the sea. Water from the sea evaporates, condenses over the mountains, and rain saturates the rivers once again. Similarly, for money to be successful and achieve mass adoption, it must flow. This really is just a metaphor for saleability.
Imagine the oceans 'hoarding' the water once it arrived. Not allowing vapor to return to the atmosphere. This would be a disaster, and the value achieved by the flowing water – sustaining villages, wildlife, and ecosystems, would be lost.
Similarly, simply holding a crypto and hoping for 'number go up' without use in transactions can never in and of itself bring a sustainable, lasting value as money to an economy. Remarkable gains may be achieved, but systematically, as long as a coin is still beholden to antiquated financial systems that choke its utility, it will be those systems that remain, with the coin merely becoming a kind of 'lotto' within said undesirable system.
What BCH Has Going For It
All this in view, the following are attributes of BCH which I think portend a potentially great future:
Extremely fast txs, extremely cheap tx fees
Active, enthusiastic community, meetups spurring merchant adoption
Popular wallets and apps generally have a simple, understandable, clean UX for crypto neophytes
In short, BCH lines up with Carl Menger's definition of saleability quite nicely:
Carl Menger, a central figure in the Austrian school of economics, defined saleability as the “facility with which they can be disposed of at a market at any convenient time at current purchasing prices.” From this definition, Menger states that the most saleable good in an economy is destined to be used as money in a free society.
It's not so easy to dispose of BTC "at any convenient time at current purchasing prices." A simple cup of coffee should not incur steep transaction fees or take hours to buy. As more people in the crypto space and beyond begin to understand this, I think we will see a rise in BCH's market value.
