The only thing most Bitcoin Cash users care about is using it as money to buy goods and pay for services, that’s why Cryptonize.it started. Even though this is what Bitcoin is and a lot of merchants and services started accepting Bitcoin as cash, we don’t see that translating in an increase of transaction volume.

We already have the 32MB blocks and merchants on our side. Increasing transaction volume should be a priority for the Bitcoin Cash community because it would unleash more of Bitcoin. The question is, how?

On-chain services

One very direct and great way of increasing transaction volume is by encouraging on-chain services like memo.cash Being worried about ‘bloat’ or ‘spam’ is nonsense; if users (don’t) include a fee to any given transaction and miners are satisfied with the attached (or lack of) fee on that given transaction and include it in a block, there is no reason for anyone to be against it. That’s how this system works, deal with it.

New users

Attracting new users to BCH who have yet to buy their first cryptocurrency is great because people would get introduced to crypto as digital cash instead of as an ‘investment’. This will have an impact on how they view the technology in general. Every coin they encounter from then on, will be compared to the friction-less and easy use of Bitcoin Cash.

For the most part in Western society (where Bitcoin Cash currently mostly is being used based on the customer-base of cryptonize.it) the banking system works fine for the average Joe (or Hanz). They get paid in fiat, can spend their fiat on anything most people like to spend it on, they ‘know’ the ‘value’ of the state-backed currency etc. Convincing these people to buy Bitcoin Cash and then use it to spend it, is an uphill battle.

Skin in the game

People who already own cryptocurrencies (not specifically Bitcoin Cash) have already registered to an exchange, did the whole AML/KYC dance and have exchanged fiat for digital assets. These are people who have skin in the game, most likely for reasons that are based on false assumptions. These are the people who are most likely to be convinced of Bitcoin as digital cash if you manage to get them to use it as such, even once. Attracting users of other communities is a bit harder then you might expect though, mainly if you limit yourself to not supporting these coins in any way. Supporting altcoins in any way would undermine what Bitcoin is trying to achieve while not supporting altcoins rejects their (probably misinformed) users. Here are some ideas on how to attract these users:

Exchanges

Imagine you’re average Joe (or Hanz) and you bought Ripple at $1.00 because; ‘look at what happened to Bitcoin’. For some naive reason, people think Ripple can come to have the same value appreciation over time. So you got your $500,- worth of Ripple and you’re holding it for weeks, maybe months. You don’t use it because, why would you? On what? It’s a ‘banking system’ or whatever.

Over time you see nothing really happening but you’re still convinced ‘blockchain’ is the next big thing and you’re excited to be involved because it’s going to better the world! So you keep supporting it or perhaps ‘diversify your portfolio’ ( I always laugh at this, have you seen the charts? They all move the same way, always, every one.) This is a point where there is an opportunity for Bitcoin Cash to be the choice to ‘diversify’ ones portfolio with. Ads on exchanges with a message of ‘invest in Bitcoin as cash’ (or something else) could achieve that goal. This might be something that could be picked up by the Bitcoin Cash Fund.

Payment processors

It’s hard to ask payment processors to not process payments of altcoin users even if that would be better for BCH; Bitcoin is too small to live off being a payment processor. You don’t want to restrict your user (merchants) in ways to get paid and merchants usually don’t want to restrict their users (customers) in ways to pay them. If you run a payment processor and you would like to support Bitcoin as cash, you might consider showing the fee related to the transaction that’s about to be processed and highlight the cheapest, which is already done by some.

People like saving money and if they see they can save money when paying with Bitcoin Cash, chances are next time they will.

Merchants

If you’re a merchant who sells products or services and accepts a cryptocurrency as payment, you are validating that specific currency as money.

Being co-founder of an online retailer, we can lead by example. At cryptonize.it, you can only pay with Bitcoin Cash. This makes it so that if you want the certainties you get of buying off a registered business and still want to pay with cryptocurrency, you need to get Bitcoin Cash. Looking at what we can do to attract altcoin users, we decided to list merchandise with logo’s of altcoins on cryptonize.it and try to get people who already own cryptocurrencies to convert it to BCH and experience what it’s like to use Bitcoin as cash. Anybody who owns cryptocurrencies has first heard of Bitcoin and of what it’s supposed to be capable of. By making it as intuitive and straightforward as possible to shop online, cryptonize.it offers the real Bitcoin experience; Bitcoin as cash.

Miners

Miners could include a set of transactions for free and voluntarily and remove the ‘dust’ limit. This has been announced by nChain and CoinGeek and other miners and pools should follow that example. The added value is obvious if we look at applications like Memo.cash and KeyPort. Some people don’t like to see an increase in transactions by these kind of applications but as long as miners are willing to mine these transactions, there is nothing you can or should say to discourage that.