In the Bitcoin whitepaper, the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto described Bitcoin as a “peer-to-peer version of electronic cash.” But as the Bitcoin network grew over time, so did transaction fees and confirmation times, making it harder to actually use Bitcoin for everyday transactions.

Since then, a number of alternative cryptocurrencies have emerged to challenge Bitcoin for the mantle of electronic cash. The two biggest contenders by market cap and by popularity are Bitcoin Cash and Litecoin.

In 2011, a Google software engineer named Charlie Lee cloned Bitcoin’s code base in his free time and made some small but significant tweaks to the code, including a new hashing algorithm, faster block times, and a larger total supply. The result was Litecoin, which emerged as a “digital silver” to Bitcoin’s digital gold. Litecoin was intended for use in small, everyday transactions.

Six years later, as transaction fees on the Bitcoin network spiked to new heights and confirmation times slowed to a crawl, a contentious hard fork split the network into two — leading to the creation of Bitcoin Cash. Like Litecoin, Bitcoin Cash aimed to create a currency suitable for digital transactions. Bitcoin Cash increased the block size limit of Bitcoin from 1MB to 8MB, allowing the forked currency to process between four to eight times Bitcoin’s transaction volume. Bitcoin Cash saw itself as fulfilling Bitcoin’s promise of a borderless, frictionless, electronic cash.

Here’s how Bitcoin Cash compared against Litecoin on February 1, 2018, six months after the Bitcoin Cash hard fork.

Here’s how they compared a year later, on February 15, 2019:

To evaluate how each lives up to its mission replacing Bitcoin as a useable, spendable, electronic cash, we’ll compare them across three key axes:

Scalability: How do Bitcoin Cash and Litecoin compare in terms of scaling transaction throughput?

How do Bitcoin Cash and Litecoin compare in terms of scaling transaction throughput? Transaction volume: Are more people using Bitcoin Cash or Litecoin, measured in real transaction volume?

Are more people using Bitcoin Cash or Litecoin, measured in real transaction volume? Mining: How do Litecoin and Bitcoin Cash compare when it comes to mining centralization?

Digging into these differences makes it clear that while Bitcoin Cash and Litecoin hold different philosophies when it comes to scaling their networks for everyday transactions, these differences haven’t actually made a huge difference to date. Both have seen transaction volumes decline over the past year, putting into question whether the market needs or even wants digital cash right now.

Block Sizes Still Don’t Matter Yet

Currently, Bitcoin Cash’s 32-MB block size is thirty-two times as large as Litecoin’s 1-MB block size. However, new Litecoin blocks are added every 2.5 minutes, compared to ten minutes for Bitcoin Cash. That means that over the same period of time, Bitcoin Cash’s blocks have around eight times the space of Litecoin’s.

The average transaction size for a Bitcoin Cash transaction is around 250 bytes. With 32-MB blocks generated every ten minutes, this means that Bitcoin Cash is theoretically capable of supporting 768,000 transactions per hour or upwards of 18,000,000 transactions per day.

Meanwhile, the average transaction size for a Litecoin transaction is around 443 bytes. With 1-MB blocks generated every 2.5 minutes, this means that Litecoin is theoretically capable of supporting 54,144 transactions per hour or 1,299,000 transactions per day.

While transaction volume on Bitcoin Cash and Litecoin isn’t close to what either network can support, the difference in block size shows how the two different networks are thinking about scaling. Bitcoin Cash advocates supported raising Bitcoin’s block size from 1 MB to 8 MB at first, and subsequently increased the block size limit further to 32 MB. They believed that increasing the block size would allow Bitcoin Cash to become the default currency for small, everyday transactions. The Litecoin developers have instead focused on experimenting with Layer-2 solutions to scale — although they haven’t ruled out increasing the block size if blocks become 50% or more full.

So far, Bitcoin Cash’s massive block size limit hasn’t mattered at all, as the average Bitcoin Cash block size is just 28 kilobytes. If Bitcoin Cash adoption grew exponentially, the network could process a higher transaction throughput than Litecoin today — but so far, the level of usage on the network simply isn’t there.

On Litecoin, similarly, the average block size is currently 18KB — significantly below Litecoin’s 1MB block threshold.

Despite the contentious nature of the block size debate, the truth is that bigger blocks simply haven’t mattered yet. Bitcoin Cash and Litecoin have adopted different approaches to scaling — the former seeks to scale transaction volume with bigger blocks, and the latter with Lightning and other Layer-2 solutions. Currently, however, that conversation may be premature, as transaction volume on each network is below what those networks can sustain.

Transaction Volume is Higher on Litecoin, but Neither Currency Is as Ubiquitous as Cash Yet

Bitcoin Cash and Litecoin both were born out of a desire to create a digital currency that was easy and fast to spend. So far, actual usage measured by transaction volume hasn’t caught up. Both are capable of confirming transactions faster than Bitcoin, with cheaper fees — but transaction volume for both networks has lagged substantially behind Bitcoin’s.

Bitcoin Cash and Litecoin both share a number of properties that make them easier to use for everyday transactions than Bitcoin. With an average transaction fee of $0.002 USD, Bitcoin Cash is cheaper to send and use than Litecoin, which has an average transaction fee of $0.025. But because Litecoin blocks are generated faster, transactions are confirmed around 4x faster than Bitcoin Cash, taking 2.5 minutes compared to ten minutes for Bitcoin Cash.

A little over a year following the Bitcoin Cash hard fork in September 2018, Bitcoin Cash reached an all-time-high transaction volume of two million. Since then, Bitcoin Cash transactions have fallen by around 99% to 10,000 transactions per day today.

Litecoin transaction volume, meanwhile, peaked in January 2018 at 225,000 transactions per day, before falling down to 22,000 transactions per day currently.