There are those who consider applications of the blockchain outside of its purely electronic-cash use-case to be (at the very least potentially) harmful to the network. An argument from someone in that camp might go as follows: "Non-cash applications of the blockchain bloat the blockchain with data that is irrelevant to its underlying purpose, which is to facilitate an electronic cash system. Therefor, those apps take away from that cash use-case." This argument is short sighted for two main reasons, however.

The first reason is that it assumes that one knows better than the network as a whole what constitutes "bloat" of the blockchain. In order to claim that there are transactions that "bloat" the blockchain in the first place, one must first define "bloat", which leads to the excessively subjective definition of bloat as transactions that "shouldn't" be on the blockchain... by some as of yet undefined standard. The question of course then becomes, who gets to determine which transactions should or should not be included? Who decides on the standard? Lucky for us, Bitcoin already has a built in answer to this question! The miners make that decision, and have been making it every time they've mined a block since Bitcoin's inception. They've chosen which transactions "should" or "shouldn't" be included, as dictated by maximizing their profits. If there are transactions trying to make their way onto the blockchain that a miner does not consider worth including, they will simply not include them in their candidate block.

Given that, any transaction that makes it onto the blockchain is, by definition, not bloat. It was considered worth the extra storage space/orphan risk/etc. by the only entity that matters on the network at the time: the miner who found the next valid block.

In addition, the fact that a miner has considered it profitable to include those transactions implies that those transactions are actually *strengthening* the blockchain's use case as a decentralized ledger for an electronic cash system because those transactions are providing profit to those who secure the network, and the more profit available to those securing the network, the more secure it will become (as more hashpower comes online to take those profits).

The only way non-cash-use transactions could "take away" from the cash use case is if there were an arbitrary limit on the number of transactions allowed to be processed in a given time period. If that limit were reached, a fee market would emerge where users of the cash aspect of the blockchain would be forced to outbid users of the non-cash uses of the blockchain. Such a situation is not fundamentally different, however, from a situation where that arbitrary limit is reached by purely cash-use-case transactions, and any miner who wanted to differentiate between a "cash-use" transaction and a "non-cash-use" transaction might find it to be an impossible task. The real problem in that situation comes from the imposition of an arbitrary limit on network capacity, not from the use-cases of the transactions that reached that capacity.

Such a situation has, in fact, already occurred for Bitcoin (BTC) due to its policy against blocksize-limit increases and failure to scale effectively in other ways. That situation is unlikely to occur for Bitcoin (Cash, BCH), however, given its commitment to on chain scaling and keeping the blocksize limit well above current usage. (One might argue that, given such a philosophy, there should be no hard-coded blocksize limit at all, and I would agree with them. Any miner may choose to not mine on top of what they consider a maliciously large block, the profitability of doing so depending on the likelihood that more than 50% of the hashpower will also refuse to mine on top of it. Market influenced dynamics such as these do not, as far as I can tell, required hard coded limits and are, I would guess, hindered by it.)

The second reason that the original critique of non-cash usecases is shortsighted is that, while the blockchain was invented to solve several problems in making a peer to peer electronic currency, that fact does not actually imply that cash necessarily be its only application, or even its "main" application. (It very well might be, of course. What the "killer app" of the blockchain will be is not the point of this article.) Use of the tokens on the blockchain as cash is, indeed, a prerequisite for the function of the blockchain in the first place, since there needs to be a reward for investing proof of work into the network, and what good would that reward be if it were a valueless token? But, once that use-case has been established, there is no reason to assume that the blockchain wouldn't have even further reaching applications than its use as a ledger for an uncensorable and border-less electronic payment system.

The network structure that allows for Bitcoin, namely the blockchain, is not just a decentralized ledger. It is, more generally, a decentralized timestamp server secured and governed by proof of work. When described in that way, the potential applications of such a network become obviously wider in scope than an electronic cash system. The system does require, as was mentioned above, an underlying cash system in order to incentivize the securing of the system via proof of work. That cash system, however, is arguably only an underlying (and necessary!) component of the blockchain. The blockchain itself, however, when secured and maintained because of its underlying digital cash properties, is a platform on which a whole slew of world changing applications can be built.