I am writing this article to inform those who are investing into eCash with little to no knowledge about the background of eCash. Given the history, it is hard for me to be unbiased but I will nevertheless try to present the situation as neutral as possible.

How and why eCash was created

eCash is a fork from Bitcoin Cash today created by Amaury Séchet, one of the original Bitcoin Cash founders/developers. Forks happen if there is contention about important issues that cause the community to split.

While Amaury had been known to be stubborn and hard to work with in the past, the tipping point for the split was his unilateral attempt to implement a very unpopular feature into Bitcoin Cash without community or miner concensus: compulsory sharing of a part of the block reward with his company Bitcoin ABC.

This was controversial for multiple reasons

• It encourages building of cartels between miners and development teams (e.g. kickbacks from the development team to the miners)

• It encourages centralization because the proposal did not have an open mechanism to fund other Bitcoin Cash implementations

• the money would go to an undefined legal entity with zero oversight, presumably completely in the hands of Amaury Séchet

• it exposes the legal entity collecting and sharing these fees to governmental control, making it a single point of failure / coercion

In my article history, you will find more information about this from a time where we were still hoping to mend the bridges burned down by Amaury, for example:

https://read.cash/@ZakMcRofl/bringing-the-community-and-bitcoin-abc-back-together-d474f10c

Once it became obvious that Amaury would not back down, all other node development teams rejected the self-funding code changes he had made.

Bitcoin ABC (aka eCash) and community reaction after the chain split

As it became clear that Bitcoin ABC / eCash has no majority with the miners, they did minimal steps to avoid the ensuing chaos. No replay protection was added, causing transactions on the BCH network to be valid on the Bitcoin ABC chain we now know as eCash (to my knowledge this is still the case today). However, to their credit, they gave up the ticker BCH in favor of BCHA (now XEC) which at least prevented confusion on exchanges.

Today, almost all Bitcoin Cash developers, marketeers, users and supporters gave up on Bitcoin ABC/eCash side and remained with the BCH ticket and its decentralized method of development. Only a handful of developers is developing code supported by both blockchains because they are currently still fairly compatible on a code level, I would estimate that 99% of the community gave up on Bitcoin ABC/eCash.

Meanwhile, Bitcoin ABC took took almost 8 months to do a rebranding

Why you should be careful investing in eCash

In the last weeks, eCash has seen a major price increase. To be honest, the rise did not seem very organic because there were no major events like a new software feature or annoucement, nor was there any adoption. To my knowledge, not a single web shop accepts eCash. On reddit it was observed that there was a sudden increase of influencer posts about eCash shortly before the price boom: https://np.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/pily66/the_window_of_opportunity_to_still_get_04_bch_for/

One could argue that a coin having a good marketing, even if it means buying positive messages from influencers, is not a reason against investing in a coin. Nevertheless you should be aware that an artifical rise in demand can very quickly turn into a downward spiral once the original boost fades.

So why do I think you should be careful with investing into eCash?

Here are my arguments:

• No adoption - compared to BCH, BTC and ETH, eCash has zero adoption

• No community except investors - if you read through https://np.reddit.com/r/ecash/ you will notice that there is almost no meaningful discussion on the merits of eCash. No annoucements of new adoption, no annoucement of new software innovations. Compare this to /r/btc or even /r/bitcoin. 90% of the posts are writting by confused people who invested into a coin without any idea why.

• Too centralized. No alternative implementations of the node software exist and the incentives being centralized makes it unlikely that someone will make one

• Difficult leadership. The person in charge, Amaury Séchet, has a track record of being hard to work with and not caring much about his own community.

• Name/Trademark risk. The term eCash is registered by another company, this is a huge risk for any business adopting eCash in the future. https://tmsearch.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4801:a7d6hx.2.4

• Slow development speed and no resources. It took Bitcoin ABC 8 months to find a new name and rebrand to it. The global network council announced for January 2021 has still not happened 9 months later

• Non-organic "growth" could lead to quick fall of price

On the plus side, I only see their re-denomination by converting what used to be a BCHA satoshi into one XEC. It is an interesting experiment if the psychological effect of this will help the coin in the long term.

In summary, I personally would not invest into eCash today. At the current prices, I would recommend Amaury to convert his eCash holdings into USD in order to fund a multi-year development. Since they left the BCH world relatively peacefully, I have no quarrel with their team and wish them best of luck with their experiment.

Edit 2021-09-14 Changed the word "solo" to "unilateral" to clarify that Amaury did a small group of Bitcoin ABC employees.