BitcoinCash (BCH), a product of debate over bitcoin scaling solution, has actually made much progress since its birth four months ago in spite of its huge controversy.

The newly founded BCH Fund was a great community support for BCH. As a nonprofit organization, its mandate is to promote the development and use of BCH by allocating funds donated to projects aiming to promote the better development of BCH. The goal of this fund is to get BCH to serve billions of users within five years.

Technical support includes the ongoing technology enhancements involving changes in address format, repair of transaction malleability, faster node synchronization, etc.

In terms of BCH’s application, it also did a great job. Recent news reported that BCH has been adopted by Dream Market, the largest Darknet market where only BTC was accepted. In addition, Blockchain, an online wallet service provider, has launched the service of BCH on its wallet, and BitPay, the world’s largest bitcoin payment service provider, has also added BCH service.

As for market support, BCH, following BTC, ETH and LTC, becomes the fourth traded cryptocurrency on Coinbase (the world’s largest digital currency trading platform), which gave the BCH community a much-needed boost and drew more international attention. On December 5, BCH was listed on the European established trading platform Bitstamp, and OKEX set up a feature for BCH as quote currency.

CoinEx, the first BCH-priced trading platform, was officially launched in late December. The CoinEx team comes from ViaBTC, whose founder Yang Haipo has long been a strong supporter of large block. Its establishment using BCH as a quote currency reflects its optimism and firm support for the future development of BCH.

It is a serious matter with 100BCH buying CoinEx’s domain name to create a brand new brand about BCH. On the occasion of CoinEx’s coming online, 8BTC.COM held a conversation with Yang Haipo about why he dared to be the first-timer, and questions about the difference between BCH and the other fork coins, as well as what the large block proponents’ believe in BCH.

This conversation lasted for around an hour just two days ahead of CoinEx’s launch. Yang lazily leaned on the couch of the newly-rented office, during the conversation his WeChat messages and phone calls keeping coming with many from the BCH Baibi Group he created. It is named Baibi because its threshold of coming into this WeChat group is that you must have at least 100 BCHs. It has been the hub of domestic high-quality-discussions on BCH.

The full conversation is as follows,

8BTC: What’s the intention of CoinEx, and why not continue ViaBTC?

Yang: Exchange is an entrance of traffic flow, but there are few good exchanges in the market. Exchanges being safe and stable, efficient enough to meet the user experience are rarely seen. And this is the reason for us to be the first ones to get involved in the exchange business. As for why I did not continue to use ViaBTC, ViaBTC is a fiat-based exchange, while we aim further to vision on the global market, so here comes the new brand CoinEx. Idea has also changed by starting CoinEx, shifting from a fiat-based exchange to a cryptocurrency exchange based on a shift in judgement about the digital currency market of the future. In the early days of the digital currency market, there were only exchanges trading between fiat and cryptocurrency, later followed by some cryptocurrency exchanges. Although at present transaction pairs with fiat or quote fiat dominate the market, it is undeniable that the market of cryptocurrency trading will be quite large in the future. It is mainly based on two judgments: diversified digital currencies and a large variety of innovations; ICO and token brought about by smart contracts represent a new kind of asset, and these coins will be traded in cryptocurrency exchanges, which would bear a very large number of trading and trading volume. Exchanges will be the gateway for investors to come in. The market will be very huge with fierce competition.

8BTC: As you mentioned, the competition is actually much fierce than ever before, for it’s now situated in a bigger international market. What can CoinEx do to deal with it?

Yang: The final winner must be the best technical team. Safe, stable and reliable is the core competence of an exchange, so our team mainly focus on developing technology and ensuring safety. In the short-term, where the market goes may be the competence of an exchange, while in the long-term, technology must be the core competitiveness. In the future, CoinEx will select mature currencies recognized by the market and margin trading. Because at present we have two missing sectors in the cryptocurrency transactions. The first is the access channel for fiat. The second is as the base currency, BCH’s volatility would lead to a high risk including many hedging demand. Considering this, we will launch the futures contract transactions, and approach to do such an OTC platform as localbitcoins.

8BTC: Why choose BCH as the base currency?

Haipo: Because BCH is the BETTER bitcoin. We now have great community support including many mainstream names and superior infrastructure for BCH. It is gradually equipped with the natures of a base currency. It excels in the transfer fees and speed, which would be the advantage to surpass BTC and become the largest digital currency in the future.

8BTC: As you just mentioned BCH may become a base currency, but recent months has witnessed two drastic fluctuations of BCH, how can a base currency be so volatile?

Haipo: Since BCH is still in the concept stage with many debates. Its overall market size is still comparatively small, so it is prone to big fluctuations. In the future, as the user scale becomes larger and the number of users increases, it tends to be stable like foreign exchange as it develops from the stage of concept to growth and final maturity. BTC has entered into the stage of growth, but it refused to scale during its growth, which is kinda suicidal. Refusing to enlarge its user base means it is a good time for BCH.

8BTC: To put it this way, in your mind, BCH is BTC.

Haipo: Yes. Here comes the question of bitcoin’s definition. According to the definition in the white paper, BCH is consistent with the definition. But the original bitcoin cannot be called currency, as you have to pay a hundred dollars for each transaction and wait for an average of three or four hours. A hundred dollars is big enough to block many bitcoin-based applications, and most of the existing transactions may only be transfers between exchanges. Most payment scenarios have been strangled, such as steem, an app that everyone once cheered but now dead. BCH can be seen as an upgrade, and BTC is like ETC in 2016. As to which shall be called bitcoin and which for BCH, it is a debate of more man-made political issue. This also explains in spite of digital currency’s decentralization it is still centralized at the moment. Some of the core leaders have defined Bitcoin. For example, in the Ethereum community, Vitalik Buterin defines which is Ethereum and then that should be Ethereum. As for the bitcoin community, Core defines Bitcoin, so what Core supports is bitcoin from this perspective. But if we look back at the ideal and vision when bitcoin is created, you may realize BCH is more like bitcoin. Technically there is no essential difference between the two, both are based on a chain. Today’s hard fork is a means of upgrade, and the distinction between naming, on one hand, it is more related with centralization, on the other hand, it is rooted with people’s stereotype. In the future I think people will consider the one with higher price as the true BTC. It will be inevitable for BCH to overtake BTC in the next 1-3 years.

8BTC: Who do you think own a greater say in the community? Miner? Blockstream? Or the users?

Haipo: In the original bitcoin community, Blockstream and Core had a greater say, they could do almost everything they wanted; But in the BCH community, BCH is more decentralized compared to BTC because there exists no obvious center and more voice from the community are heard. Inside the BCH community, everyone is more rational and open-minded to accept different voices. Although the development team is mainly led by bitcoin ABC, we also have other development teams with compatible protocols. BCH gathers the earliest bitcoin developers and supporters. If we compare Bitcoin to a company, 90% of the seniors in it have left with only some newbies who firmly believe the name and brand of BTC supporting it. You can see many core experts and users are voicing for BCH, such as Roger, Gavin, Vitalik and Jihan Wu.

8BTC: What’s your opinion about all those fork coins (such as SBTC,BCX,BTG,BCD…)? Are they the same with BCH?

Haipo: There is an essential difference between fork coins and BCH. Their history and purpose are different. BCH is the result of a community split. This starts from within the Bitcoin community which are debating on small block or large block. BCH has come a long way beyond our expectations, it has a huge community base with great support and acceptance within the community. Most fork coins take advantage of a model as BCH, hyped by exchanges and some leaders’ endorsement. In this way, they actually do not have a community and value foundation. A cryptocurrency relies on the community, and the user group endows them their value. However, at present, some of the fork coins are mostly created by those careerists in the air with varied purposes. While it cannot be said that they have absolutely no user base as they have prices to indicate that there must be investors supporting but not as big as the support for BCH in terms of user community and core community.

8BTC: Come back to the intention of BCH, there’s the classic debate over buying coffee with bitcoin. For proponents of large block for BCH, do they really want to use BCH for buying coffee?

Haipo: First of all, I do not think it is a suitable case of using BCH to buy coffee. In the future, BCH will be a very widely used payment currency. We now have no global common currency in the world, maybe USD is close to it. However, USD has its own problems, as it is the credit currency of a statutory states, regulated by the Fed’s policy and subject to the bank settlement system. In fact, its transaction speed and costs are unpleasant as the current Bitcoin. Overseas remittances may take a few days to arrive. In this context, BCH is perfect as an international settlement currency. Back to the issue of buying coffee with BCH, people have their own choices, and they will choose the most convenient payment in a given scenario. Why buy coffee with BCH if WeChat payment is available? However, WeChat payment has its limitations. More than half of the world’s population do not have a bank card, credit card, nor smart phone, that is, they have no access to traditional financial services. And it will be exactly the advantage of BCH as it truly becomes an Internet-based world currency.

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