BitcoinCash finally launched on 1 August 2017 splitting from the main bitcoin chain. It is a fork of main bitcoin chain with big blocks and without Segwit and RBF(Replace by fee) features. The launch of BitcoinCash was accompanied by several badly written and wrong articles on various popular news websites such as CNBC, BusinessInsider, NewsBTC etc.

What is BitcoinCash?

Bitcoincash is an altcoin that is generated from a fork in the bitcoin chain that is supported by the people that dont want segwit and wants bigger block in the bitcoin chain. It is being supported by big chinese mining pools such as ViaBTC and exchanges such as Kraken, Huobi etc. However, a large number of other countries straight up refused to support the BitcoinCash chain. Indian Exchanges, Coinbase, Poloniex and a number of other exchanges are not supporting the BitcoinCash fork.

Wrong Media Articles about BitcoinCash

Accompanied with the launch of BitcoinCash, several badly written articles started appearing on popular media websites such as CNBC, BusinessInsider and NewsBTC which appears straight up paid articles. CNBC published “Bitcoin falls, futures for new ‘bitcoin cash’ leap nearly 50% as ‘miners’ officially split currency” just a minute after BitcoinCash chain was launched. Bitcoin’s price barely moved the same day and is still hovering around $2750. The 50% leap for BitcoinCash was after 50% drop in the price in the recent days and was on future contracts since no exchange had enabled BitcoinCash trading. They kept changing the headline as the price dropped for BitcoinCash and it currently reads “Bitcoin falls, new ‘bitcoin cash’ briefly leaps nearly 50% then dives as digital currency splits”.

BusinessInsider posted “Orders for bitcoin cash are ‘exploding'” and another article with title “Bitcoin is sinking as bitcoin cash goes live” which they later changed to “Bitcoin swings ahead of an announcement that will determine its future”. Currently no exchange has been able to enable deposits for the Bitcoincash chain since it is not secure to allow low confirmations on the chain. It is vulnerable to a 51% attack so exchanges are using a high number of confirmations for deposits. Kraken posted a tweet saying that people have to wait a total of 8-80 hours to get their deposits on the exchange. Since people cannot sell BitcoinCash other than the amount they hold on the exchange, it is really idiotic to say that the orders are exploding. Since people cannot sell bitcoincash, buy orders are naturally going to increase.

Both the articles appears to be paid and promotional and are misleading to a large number of people. It isnt nothing new, since these websites have been accused of fake news articles a lot of time in the past. The people behind BitcoinCash are rich and purchasing such articles on websites isnt difficult for them.

Conclusion

It is people’s responsibility to research everything that is published online. We would like to suggest to follow popular bitcoiner’s on twitter such as Jimmy Song, Charlie Lee, Charlie Shrem, Alistair Milne etc. for better coverage about cryptocurrencies and not to trust typical news websites.

Let us know in the comments what you think about paid articles and how they can affect the new people that are just starting up in the crypto world.