Wednesday, August 2, 2017

Bitcoin Cash Price Doubles to $443, The Story So Far

bitcoin cash price doubles

The past 24 hours have been pretty interesting for the Bitcoin ecosystem, to say the least. Bitcoin Cash’s fork has gone off without too many problems, which is good to see. There have been no major network issues so far, and the BCH price across exchanges more than doubled from a low of $216 prior to the fork, to the current price of $443. Things are looking quite well for this altcoin, that much is evident. The bigger question is whether or not the momentum can be maintained.

Bitcoin Cash Launch is a Moderate Success

A lot of people were doubting whether or not the Bitcoin Cash launch would be successful or not. After all, a fork of an existing blockchain is always cause for some concern. So far, none of these expected problems have occurred so far, even though the fork may have happened a bit earlier than originally anticipated. It seems all timers keeping track of this development were off a bit, but it did not impact either blockchain in a negative manner whatsoever.

Moreover, it seems most users have received their BCH as expected. We now have an official number of coins in circulation, which is not the same as the number of BTC currently available to users. There current supply is at 16,482,113 BCH, according to Coinmarketcap. Bitcoin on the other hand, has a circulating supply of 16,483,425.

This small discrepancy is nothing to worry about, as it appears the Bitcoin Cash blockchain is slightly behind the regular blockchain as well. Multiplying the number of missing” blocks with the expected block reward should make both supplies identical copies of one another.  This delay in block heights is to be expected, as Bitcoin Cash has a lot less mining support right now.

To be more specific, ViaBTC is only finding 25% of the Bitcoin Cash network blocks right now. That is somewhat strange, a sit seems one individual miner is responsible for all other network blocks. A total of 13 blocks has been discovered since the fork took place, which is surprisingly low. Until more miners switch over to BCH, not much will change in this regard, though.There are multiple mining pools who support BCH right now, yet miners aren’t too keen on switching over just yet.

The one aspect about Bitcoin Cash that interests most people is whether or not the price is holding up. It is evident there has been an initial market dump, although no one expected anything else. Most people see BCH as “free money” and sell it at whatever price they can. In a lot of cases, that was around 0.05 Bitcoin per BCH. Right now, one BCH token is valued at 0.16 Bitcoin, which means people could have gotten three times as much money for their tokens by just waiting a few hours. Bittrex is the market leader in both volume and price right now, followed by Kraken and ViaBTC.

Perhaps the most intriguing part is how Bitcoin Cash is the third largest cryptocurrency by market cap right now. We expected BCH to become one of the larger currencies when everything was said and done, but a top three spot was not exactly anticipated. With a current market cap of US$7. 2bn, Bitcoin Cash is on the right track to remain well ahead of Ripple for now. Whether or not it can overtake Ethereum, remains to be seen, as the gap is quite large. It is impossible to tell what the future holds for BCH, but for now, things are looking pretty good.

If you liked this article, follow us on Twitter @themerklenews and make sure to subscribe to our newsletter to receive the latest bitcoin, cryptocurrency, and technology news.



from The Merkle