Ken Shishido, a Bitcoin Cash evangelist and crypto entrepreneur with strong ties to Roger Ver, believes that this year will be all about BCH. Shishido is an early-stage investor in crypto projects like Breadwallet, Yours, Stashcrypto and more. He has also been the co-organizer of Tokyo Bitcoin meetups since 2013 – he has personally hosted 67 meetups until now.

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When I asked him to predict where the market will go this year, he starts with a rather gloomy forecast. He claims that there will be a huge crash in the altcoin market. “People are talking about the price but the reality is that these coins have no practical usage, except for very few. When BCH will get more adopted and people will see that you can actually use it to buy goods and services, the price will go up and people will question those altcoins that don’t have that practical usage.”

Discussing the future price of his own dear currency, Shishido is more cautious: “I don’t want to give a number, but it can go up significantly”. But when I ask him about the near future of BCH’s market cap, he answers with confidence: “It will be THE largest!”

Ken Shishido took what he refers to as his “red pill” after becoming disappointed with the current financial system. “I started questioning what money is, so I turned to Bitcoin.” But not long after he found himself also questioning Bitcoin (or as he calls it, Bitcoin Core): “BTC developers team has been hijacked. I see censorship on Bitcoin. We can no longer talk about block size.”

So, his second moment of epiphany came when Bitcoin Cash forked from its parent currency and started making its way in the market. “Bitcoin Cash is Bitcoin”, he says.

Adoption, Adoption, Adoption

The main advantage, from his perspective, is that Bitcoin Cash transaction fees are less than $0.001, compared to around $30 for Bitcoin. “We now have a block size of 8MB and tested the size of 32MB, and it works!”, says Shishido.

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Another advantage his currency has over its parent currency is the transaction speed. “People can no longer use Bitcoin for daily commerce,” he said. But when we try to understand why most people still view Bitcoin as the main cryptocurrency, he says it’s a matter of a “cognitive dissonance”.

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His vision, and even his life’s mission, is to increasing the applicability of Bitcoin Cash. “The most important thing is not the price. It’s about the adoption. I try to convince merchants and people to use Bitcoin Cash, instead of fiat.” Judging from the way it looks right now, Shishido has his work cut out for him. Even though BCH is present on most larger exchanges, unlike with the original Bitcoin there’s not much you can do with the forked currency when in comes to spending your money on day to day needs.

But this has a lot to do with BCH’s marketing methods, which Shishido and his colleagues prefer to keep on a grassroots level. “Bitcoin is about people, so I rather want to see an individual person’s movement.” He says that even though he personally knows most of the crypto exchange CEOs in Japan, he can’t convince them to take on BCH, unless there is public pressure from their clients.

Forex to crypto

The Japanese financial landscape on the retail level is rapidly changing before our very eyes. Japan, which has the world’s most forex activity per capita, is shifting towards the new crypto world. “Bitcoin has been given a legal status in Japan in April (…) Now we see a lot of money going to BTC. We have a massive number of traders coming to the crypto space. They see the Bitcoin space as more attractive because it operates 24 hours a day and there are no limits. Bitcoin and all kinds of altcoins have skyrocketed since then.”

The biggest names in the local forex industry, such as DMM, GMO Click, Rakuten, SBI and others, spotted this trend in time. These titans have set up their own exchanges, mining operations and even pay their employees with BTC. “All the big companies started applying for the crypto exchange license”.

Cars vs. Horses

Shishido is quite sceptical when it comes to the success of Ripple and the prospects of this mostly institutional backed currency succeeding. He uses the implementation of cars in Japan as a historical analogy to Bitcoin’s supremacy vs. Ripple – which in his example would be the horse. “None of the automobiles pivot from the horse industry”.

He compared the FUDsters to those people in Japan’s history who were sceptical about the possibility of using cars instead of horses: “We no longer ride on horses. This horse industry – the banking industry – is scared of our Bitcoin technology, but eventually, I don’t think they’ll survive”.