During the recent San Francisco Blockchain Week, Cornell University Professor Emin Gün Sirer shared his thoughts on the development of Bitcoin Cash (BCH).

After the BCH devcon, Sirer expressed some of his excitement about the project in an interview with CoinSpice. In addition to praising the teams for their work, Sirer also showed support for the idea of cryptocurrency as a “medium of exchange,” as opposed to a “store of value.” He said:

“Blockchains in general are meant to be used. They're not meant to be sat upon, stored in a vault, in a cage, or to serve as an imaginary store of value… they are valuable because they serve a purpose, and BCH clearly does.” –@el33th4xor Full interview: https://t.co/u0FHQKEYBm pic.twitter.com/NFRGZDbQko — Bitcoin (@Bitcoin) October 15, 2018

Sirer’s comments highlight an ongoing debate that has been stirring in the cryptocurrency community as some in the space disagree about how the technology should be scaled.

Last week, Bitcoin (BTC) developer Jimmy Song suggested that people who want to spend their Bitcoin should use credit cards to buy it, and then cash out their Bitcoin to pay the bills each month. In a podcast interview earlier this month, Song said that the best thing the crypto community can do for the industry is hold BTC, instead of spending it.

Members of the BCH community contend that cryptocurrency gets its value from its utility as a medium of exchange. They also argue that cryptocurrency is needed as a medium of exchange now, especially in struggling economies like Venezuela or Ukraine, and among the unbanked in the developing world.

Sterlin Lujan, Communications Ambassador for Bitcoin.com has said that Satoshi’s original vision of Bitcoin was for it to be decentralized, peer-to-peer cash. In an Op-Ed earlier this year, Lujan suggested that this vision is not shared by many of the developers who were drawn to the space by price increases over the years. Lujan writes:

“The insurgent developers did not share Satoshi’s vision. They did not believe that bitcoin could or should scale so that everyone can use it as cash. They believed bitcoin should be a store of value or commodity. They even suggested that high fees and slow confirmation times are a good thing for bitcoin.”

With so many different teams and points of view, the market will ultimately decide which projects achieve mass adoption.