Wow, here’s a great piece of propaganda if I ever saw one. Jimmy Song has published a video entitled “Bitcoin Cash is Fiat Money”. Yes, that’s the actual title.

This lie is not entirely shocking because there is a contingent of people in the cryptocurrency space that absolutely hate and feel threatened by Bitcoin Cash.

Just to give you an idea of where this person is coming from, Jimmy stated in a tweet that the way to use Bitcoin as a payment method is actually to use a credit card instead:

I hope you, the reader, are intelligent enough that you don’t require an explanation of what’s wrong with this idea :)

Bitcoin Cash Myths

Here’s the major points from Jimmy’s video (which all happen to be wrong).

Myth #1: Bitcoin Cash was started by Bitmain, therefore its centralized.

Bitmain was involved in the creation of Bitcoin Cash (most notably by publishing the contingency plan in response to “UASF”) but so were many others, including myself, including devs from Bitcoin ABC, Bitcoin Unlimited, ViaBTC… in fact Bitcoin Cash was the culmination of an entire community that was fed up with the subversion of Bitcoin.

Even if Bitmain was the sole progenitor, it wouldn’t matter anyway. Satoshi Nakamoto could have been one guy. What matters is the community that gets involved after something is created.

BCH is supported by many companies, including the other giants in the industry such as Coinbase, Bitpay, Bitcoin.com, and more. It has a rich ecosystem with support from almost every exchange, dozens of wallets and services, multiple active node implementation teams, and burgeoning meetup groups all over the world.

Myth #2: Bitcoin Cash proponents are unfairly claiming an advantage over other cryptocurrencies because it is a fork of BTC.

I don’t know what is unfair about pointing out facts. That Bitcoin Cash forked the ledger rather than starting a new one may in fact be an advantage. Using the existing ledger provides fair distribution and is more attractive for new people to join the community, especially in light of all the opportunistic scams going on these days.

Myth #3: Bitcoin Cash is an “airdropped altcoin”.

Jimmy says this because he would love nothing more than to paint BCH as an “altcoin”, having no valid claim to the Bitcoin title. He does not want you to consider that Bitcoin Cash was not intended as an airdropped coin at all, but instead was birthed from a 4 year long controversy that split the Bitcoin community in two.

Although the the ledger with the BTC ticker kept the lion’s share of the market cap, the community was more or less bisected.

Also, technically an airdrop is different from a fork. In a fork, your private keys already exist and control coins. Jimmy wants to label this an airdrop simply because it makes it sound more like a cheap alt coin.

Myth #4: Bitcoin Cash is fiat money because “it was created without much effort”.

Creating your own definition for things seems to be a favorite disinformation tactic lately.

Fiat money is government issued money. Bitcoin Cash is a cryptocurrency. So this is a ridiculous claim. Jimmy proffers his own definition of fiat money which includes the characteristic that “it was created without much effort”.

Actually, a great deal of effort goes into Bitcoin Cash and the development of its ecosystem. This is why it’s growing and is still the #4 coin even after a year.

Myth #5: Bitcoin Cash is politically centralized.

This is a classic case of projection. According to Jimmy: “there’s an elite group in the background that determines the roadmap”. But weren’t the Blockstream/Core developers for BTC not an elite group that determined its roadmap?

Bitcoin Cash is actually quite decentralized politically, with various competing factions (Bitcoin ABC, Bitcoin Unlimited, Bitcoin XT, Bitprim, and others).

Myth #6: Hard fork upgrades force changes onto users.

Bitcoin is a technology, and sometimes technology needs to be upgraded. This can be done as a hard fork or a soft fork. Hard forks are a clean way to upgrade.

Soft forks are messy because they contort the network in order to introduce new functionality while maintaining backward compatibility. Take SegWit, for example. Sure, the new transaction formats are optional but non-upgraded nodes see the outputs as being able to be spent by anyone (e.g. “anyone-can-spend”).

Because something is optional doesn’t mean it won’t affect you. Imagine you live in a quiet town and suddenly there’s an ordinance that allows your neighbors to ‘optionally’ have loud parties at 3 a.m.

Myth #7: Bitmain is the “central bank” of Bitcoin Cash.

Bitmain holds a lot of Bitcoin Cash (less than 5% of the supply). This doesn’t make it a central bank.

Some have speculated that the BTC market is also highly manipulated; these rumors are substantiated by the fact that the USDT (Tether) stablecoin has never been audited and has a multi-billion dollar market cap. Since tether can be printed out of thin air, this is much more of a central bank model.

(XRP is also much more centralized with the Ripple company holding about half the supply.)

As Jimmy points out, a market cannot be ‘propped up’ forever. So, even if Bitmain is supporting the price, eventually it may fluctuate lower than it otherwise would have. But who cares? That doesn’t make Bitcoin Cash have a central bank model or make it any less useful for payments.

Myth #8: Choosing to be a method-of-payment is a bad choice for a cryptocurrency.

Bitcoin was always intended as a peer to peer electronic cash system. It’s in the title of the whitepaper. Look it up.

Plus it just makes sense. This is supposed to be a new kind of money. It’s called cryptocurrency for a reason. Without being useful as a payment method, why would it have any value? And if doesn’t have value, how it could then be a ‘store of value’?

I shouldn’t have to explain the idiocracy here.

Myth #9: Using second layers is “how you scale Bitcoin”.

This is something Jimmy states matter-of-factly as if it was some undisputed axiom. No… this is how the Bitcoin Core developer group thinks you scale Bitcoin.

It’s certainly not how Satoshi Nakamoto thinks you scale Bitcoin.

Nor anyone else in the Bitcoin Cash community. In fact, BTC is the only coin in existence with intentionally limited on-chain capacity.

Myth #10: BTC is more censorship resistant than Bitcoin Cash.

While it is true that BTC has the most hash rate, throttling the on-chain transaction capacity makes BTC very susceptible to economic censorship.

The problem with the Lightning Network (a key component of the BTC roadmap) is that it requires large hubs as central liquidity points. These hubs can censor the routing of your payments in a way that mining pools cannot.

Myth #11: Historically, “store of value” comes before “method of payment”.

Jimmy’s idea that gold was first a “collectible” before it was used as money seems to be true based on some basic web research. However, gold always had real world usage. Value doesn’t come from nowhere.

Gold was valued for its use in ornaments and decorations. But Bitcoin is not physical. Its real world usage literally IS because it can be used as a method of payment.

Myth #12: You shouldn’t spend Bitcoin before it has adoption.

This is an absurd idea. Usage is what gives Bitcoin value. This isn’t just theory. Here’s actual science and data that proves it.

Myth #13: Only BTC users are sovereign over their own money. Every other blockchain is centralized.

It is true that BTC gives more sovereignty and decentralization than some other smaller projects; but there is nothing inherently special about BTC. Ethereum, Dash, Litecoin, and Bitcoin Cash all provide the same basic sovereignty and decentralization.

But unlike BTC, BCH is allowed to scale to serve the world as money.

Myth #14: If there’s a central team, it could be co-opted and change the rules.

This is exactly what happened with Bitcoin Core. It implemented a new economic policy with higher fees, prevented on-chain scaling, rammed through SegWit, and pushed an unproven 2-layer scaling roadmap.

Myth #15: Bitcoin Cash promises a benevolent ruler.

Now you’re just making stuff up, Jimmy. No one in the BCH community ever said this.

Myth #16: There’s been 74 hard forks of bitcoin, including bitcoin gold, bitcoin interest, bitcoin private, bitcoin clean, bitcoin lightning etc. So BCH is just another fork.

Obviously, detractors of Bitcoin Cash would like to promote the idea that BCH is just one fork among many. A lot of the forks of BTC were only forks of the code, not the ledger. The post-BCH forks were largely opportunistic or even intentionally created to further this narrative.

Bitcoin Cash was born out of a legitimate community split over the way to scale the network. Chain splits are part of the inherent freedom provided by the Bitcoin system overall.

If all’s fair in love and war, then I don’t fault BTC supporters for trying to paint the BCH as illegitimate if they disagree with it, but their efforts to do should be recognized for what they are.

Myth #17: Bitcoin Cash “want us to trust them”. This is the main value proposition behind every coin other than Bitcoin.

This is a quite a bizarre assertion. There are over 1000 coins in existence, each with their own qualities. To my knowledge, zero of them promote the theme of “trust us” as their value proposition.

Myth #18: Bitcoin Cash does nothing different and has no reason to exist.

Bitcoin Cash is essentially Bitcoin as it functioned from 2009–2015… without an artificially constrained transaction capacity, and the high fees and unreliability that result from it. The most obvious symptom was the fact that BTC transaction fees hit $50 in December of 2017.

As far as continuing to operate as Bitcoin has historically operated, it is true that it does “nothing different”. (If BTC hadn’t changed direction to include small blocks, SegWit, and 2nd layer “scaling”, then there would have been no reason for BCH to exist.)

In other words, BCH’s reason to exist is simply to continue Bitcoin as Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash.

Myth #19: Bitcoin Cash intentionally tricks users into thinking BCH is Bitcoin.

No one is confused about the fact that there are two distinct ticker symbols, BTC and BCH. (Or very, very few people).

‘Bitcoin’ could mean the ledger represented by BTC… But Bitcoin is also an idea — that of a peer to peer electronic cash system that Satoshi Nakamoto introduced in the whitepaper in 2008.

This system allows anyone to send any amount of money to anyone, anywhere in the world, almost for free, and no one can censor you or stop you. And personally, I think BCH is more like this idea of Bitcoin than BTC is.