Tired of Bitcoin Core trolls and bots speaking from a place of moral superiority with a tone of elitism about "the facts" about Bitcoin? I put this cheat sheet together with some math and sources to help you debate!

Feel free to copy and paste parts for your arguments on social media without citation. However, if you are going to copy and paste the entire document, please give this link and cite me as the author. Tips appreciated.

Last Edited 5/23/2018 by Kurt Wuckert Jr. and updated with constructive, technical feedback from https://www.yours.org/@jurajbednar. Juraj's writing is used and cited below.

Claim: BCH is Centralized Because a Full Node is “Too Expensive” to Run.

Rebuttal: the only limitations to having big blocks and running a full node is network speed, processing power and hard drive size. All of which are minor compared with running the Bitcoin Core full node implementation.

Bitcoin Cash will have a maximum block size of 32mb for the foreseeable future and blocks are roughly every 10 minutes. Assuming full blocks (ha!), here's your storage needs and cost:

32mb every ten minutes

192mb per hour

4.6gb per day

32.3gb per week

1.680tb per year

The cost of entry for the internet speed is around $100/month, ASICS that mine BTC and BCH are nearly identical, so the processing power is nearly equal, and the cost of entry for the annual hard drive space is under $50/year. The only extra cost for running a BCH node vs a BTC node is going to be hard drive space - which, the below link shows is very small. https://bch.gg/22

To be fair, people were running Bitcoin full nodes on Raspberry Pi-s, you could not do that with full 32MB blocks if you wanted to validate all transactions (even if you had enough storage). You also need much more memory (or faster storage) to be able to reference transactions/UTXOs quickly.

Even if the cost was 32x the cost of Bitcoin Core node, here is an in-depth description explaining why the benefits outweigh the costs: https://bch.gg/21

For the almost “too small to count” difference in price for running a full node, we get about 250 transactions per second, which is comparable to the amount of PayPal transactions there are on a heavy-usage day for PayPal. Plus, small blocks have their own drawbacks:

Artificial limits on block size are central planning of supply (see: https://bch.gg/21 ). That has really bad consequences . We are using cryptocurrencies precisely because we wanted to run away from central planning.

Limited block-size networks are vulnerable to spam attacks that are demonstrably possible (see last year's spam issues on Bitcoin network) for non-state actors, what if state actors do it? It does not neatly fall with "booh, centralization" narrative, but it is essentially a security vulnerability caused by central planning of block size. And making the attack 32x more expensive (priced in native token, not dollars) is a good idea and we can go beyond than. Incidentally, the blocks would become smaller, because if the attack is not worth it, they would be empty.









Claim: Roger Ver and Jihan Wu Control Bitcoin Cash

Rebuttal: There are multiple development teams and independent developers. Bitcoin Cash was created after 2-3 years of Bitcoin Core (funded by Blockstream Corporation) pushing out great developers for disagreeing with the narrative that “Bitcoin Can’t Scale.”

Those developers were forced out and worked hard to fix Bitcoin. Their work ultimately split into multiple teams who all came together to become Bitcoin Cash in 2017.

Bitcoin ABC (development team) - run by Amaury Sechet and others: https://www.bitcoinabc.org/

Bitcoin Unlimited (development team) - run by Andrew Stone, Peter Rizun and others: https://www.bitcoinunlimited.info/

Bitcoin Classic (development team) - Ceasing Operation. Formerly run by Jeff Garzik and others: https://bitcoinclassic.com/

Bitcoin XT (development team) - Run by Mike Hearn, Gavin Andresen (Gavin was handed Bitcoin Core by Satoshi Nakamoto) and others: https://bitcoinxt.software/

BitPrim (development team): https://www.bitprim.org/

Purse (Retail Full Node Development): https://github.com/bcoin-org/bcash

Lokad (Progressive Blockchain Research): https://terab.lokad.com/

nChain (development team & computer research) - Run by Jimmy Nguyen, Craig Wright (maybe Satoshi Nakamoto) and others: https://nchain.com/en/

YoursDotOrg (development team and experimental social media platform) - run by Ryan X. Charles: https://www.yours.org/

All of the above are TEAMS of developers, which is why there is so much development on Bitcoin Cash. In contrast, BTC is developed by “Bitcoin Core” which is influenced heavily by Blockstream Corporation and Lightning Labs.









Claim: Bitcoin Cash was made by miners so they could control Bitcoin. Jihan Wu controls all mining.

Rebuttal: This is a moot point because the exact same miners and pools mine BTC and BCH. Secondly, there are more miners and pools than you think. Check out https://bch.gg/23 for statistics.

In short, Bitmain is influential, but they are not the monolith that they are made out to be.









Claim: Bitcoin.com/Roger Ver is tricking people into thinking BCH is Bitcoin

Rebuttal: In many ways, for BTC and BCH are both “bitcoin.” However, there is a semantic argument, and there is a technical argument based on open source standards: Every legitimate cryptocurrency is defined by its white paper. Coins that aggressively deviate from their white paper are considered suspect, at best. Per the White Paper, “bitcoin” must be a few different things:

Peer-to-peer digital cash: BCH is Cash. BTC is “Gold” or a “Store of Value.” Winner: BCH

The longest chain of Proof of Work to the genesis block. BTC is the longest PoW chain for now. However, the BCH chain is ahead in blocks. Tie

An unbroken chain of digital signatures. Segwit changes the entire economic model for how signatures are eventually written to the blocks. This point is contentious because Segwit adds complexity and block weight without hard-forking, but there are simpler block malleability upgrades that could have been added. BCH kept those signatures intact and simple. Winner: BCH

Decided by Consensus. BTC has majority consensus, but all dissenters were removed from the discussion. Discussion is done primarily at Reddit’s r/bitcoin, but any discussion of block size and on-chain scaling in dissent of Blockstream or Core was ruthlessly censored. Winner: Nobody.

Evidence of Moderator “Theymos” censorship:

Use of censorship forced out developer Mike Hearn from BTC. This is his farewell address with evidence of censorship of consensus: https://bch.gg/25

Segwit was a soft fork of the open source protocol of Bitcoin that many understood to have broken the standard by which the chain of digital signatures were written. Even the US Department of Commerce’s “National Institute of Standards & Technology (NIST)” acknowledged that Segwit fundamentally altered BTC, stating: ““When SegWit was activated, it caused a hard fork, and all the mining nodes and users who did not want to change started calling the original Bitcoin blockchain Bitcoin Cash (BCC/BCH). Technically, Bitcoin is a fork and Bitcoin Cash is the original blockchain .””

Under pressure from Bitcoin Core, NIST later amended their stance to a much clunkier phrasing and changing their stance to that of a chain split. Semantically, both versions are “bitcoin” because neither version of the chain can make a 100% claim to the name. BTC arguably lacks the unbroken chain of digital signatures, and use-case as a means of exchange, while BCH lacks majority hashing power and majority consensus.









Claim: SegWit Solved the Scaling Problem

Rebuttal: SegWit is a technology, created by Blockstream Co-Founder Pieter Wuille, which alters the nature of the signature data and how they are written to the blocks. This allows a greater number of partial transactions to fit into a 1MB BTC block - effectively raising block size to around 4MB by fundamentally changing the way that blocks are validated. Rather than having miners being the solo validators of the signatures within blocks (the way that Satoshi programmed them to do between 2008 and 2017), SegWit replaces the signatures with “witness data” which is essentially an IOU for a signature on the block that can be accessed later. Rather than giving miners an incentive to verify signatures within blocks, non-mining nodes verify witness data without any compensation or incentive not to cheat.

The problem with Segwit is three-fold:

SegWit fundamentally changes the nature of how digital signatures work. The soft fork of Segwit was agreed upon with a consensus that preemptively shut dissent out the conversation about whether or not SegWit “should” fundamentally change how Bitcoin transactions are written to the blockchain. This is key to the argument about why “BCH is Bitcoin” since it is technically the longest unbroken chain of digital signatures back to the genesis block. SegWit only adds marginal scalability to blocks. While it seems effective to make the data more efficient, SegWit actually adds block “weight” which is the inefficient use of the extra efficiency to fill with witness data that was validated by non-mining nodes before being pushed through a mining node. It essentially breaks away from one inefficiency and replaces it with a more complex one. Digital signatures are the cornerstone of cryptography. SegWit essentially assumes that signatures are not necessary at the time of transaction, which is another fundamental change in the philosophy and function of Bitcoin, and it’s the major reason that Bitcoin Cash rejected the addition of SegWit to the Bitcoin blockchain.

In conclusion, Segwit blocks are more complex, less profitable to mine (at scale) which causes a longterm hashing/security problem, and they don’t add any appreciable efficiency to the network as a whole. SegWit is also the primary reason that BTC perhaps shouldn’t be called “bitcoin,” since it fundamentally changed the nature of how blocks are signed. For more technical information on this point, watch this talk from Bitcoin Unlimited Lead Developer Peter Rizun explaining why Segwit Coins are not Bitcoins: https://bch.gg/2c









Claim: Blockchains can’t scale, so Bitcoin must build a graph and connect it to BTC in order to compete with Visa or PayPal.

Rebuttal: The only blockchain that won’t scale past 1MB is BTC. Digibyte is the current on-chain scaling leader. For years, Digibyte has proven that a chain can securely and reliably manage 500+ transactions per second on the blockchain with fees that are almost non-existent. If a small team like DGB can do it, why can’t the allegedly greatest developers in the world from Bitcoin Core do the same thing?

Bitcoin Cash is taking a different path than Digibyte, but we can see unequivocal proof that blockchains can scale to compete Visa and PayPal.

Claim: “Bitcoin Cash” is confusing to people who want to buy Bitcoin. You should call it “Bcash” and stop tricking people. “Bitcoin Core” is a full node implementation of BTC/XBT/Bitcoin. The coin is called “Bitcoin.”

Rebuttal: “Bcash” is also confusing to people because “BCH” is called “Bitcoin Cash” and the name “Bcash” is a full node implementation of Bitcoin Cash.

Here’s the source code for Bcash: https://github.com/bcoin-org/bcash. The other source codes for implementations of Bitcoin Cash can be found at https://www.bitcoincash.org/. We are separate implementations of the Bitcoin code (similarly to Bitcoin Gold, Bitcoin Private and many others). People should be free to pick any version of Bitcoin that they choose because this is a free market full of free people.



