Bonanza. More than 100,000 BitPay merchants are now accepting Bitcoin Cash with the option seemingly automatically turned on for all of them.

We tried testing Microsoft Store, but unfortunately they did not even show bitcoin anymore from London. Newegg, however, is happy to accept both currencies, as is Namecheap, Vultr and many, many others.

It appears Bitcoin Cash has been fully integrated in the service, with merchants waking up this morning to suddenly find out they are accepting this new green thing.

“I just checked my merchant account. Apparently I’m accepting bch now, but I have no option to receive it. Hopefully that gets addressed soon,” one merchant says.

BitPay is apparently still working on the option to provide direct BCH payments, rather than insta-converting them into dollars or bitcoin.

With many merchants known to hodl the crypto, altho the vast majority do insta-convert it, the option might be available in the coming weeks.

But this roll-out is surprising in its scale and extent as you would have thought merchants would have had to manually turn the option on.

That’s not the case because this appears to be a plugin of sorts, where you presumably just copy and paste some code and then the thing works, or updates, by itself.

It’s the same with Coinbase, which has recently launched a new crypto payments plugin. There, however, you can choose what currency to accept out of four options: ethereum, bitcoin, bitcoin cash and litecoin.

While BitPay for now offers only bitcoin cash, in addition to bitcoin. So placing the two currencies on an equal standing where merchant adoption is concerned. With both now, to an equal extent, the most widely accepted digital currencies by far.

As such, let the games begin. The hodl v spendl, the cash v gold. For at the end of it the currency that will win is the one with most utility, although there’s no reason why they can’t have different utilities except the fact they’re pretty much identical.

We have to wait and see how it plays for now, but what we are seeing is a level playing field, with bitcoin cash so becoming ubiquitous.

That means forks work and are the only governance mechanism that counts in this brave new world where freedom is built within the code itself by that genius of an unknown man.