TL;DR: During his trip to the Republic of Slovenia, Bitcoin.com founder and Chairman, Roger Ver, tweeted video of himself using bitcoin cash (BCH) to buy a few random grocery items. Over 170,000 views and voluminous amounts of comments later, one thing is clear: BTC maximalists are triggered.

Triggered: Roger Ver Uses Bitcoin Cash to Buy Groceries in Slovenia

It’s just another day for Bitcoin Cash advocates. They routinely make little videos of buying meals at a restaurant, drinks, and so forth, posting to their personal social media accounts. They do because the process is basically seamless. No know-your-customer (KYC) requirements, exposing personal information and identification to odious banks. No expensive user fees or accounts. Fast confirmation times. Reliable. Just download a wallet, grab some BCH, and find a merchant. Boom.

For human BTC maximalist triggering machine, Roger Ver, however, what should probably be a basic demonstration of using cryptocurrency in the real world has turned again into a tribal debate, and maxis are not happy. Even those not considered maxis, just regular old BTC bag holders, felt the need to scold Ver. It’s really, really odd.

In the video, Ver begins by buying a paper bag, grousing about laws passed to mandate that, asking if viewers are ready. He’s at a self-checkout stand in a mall with some colleagues, and begins scanning snack food items, soda and sweets (some of the funnier comments asked about Ver’s diet). He takes the opportunity to tell viewers he’d spoken with the company in charge of the point-of-sale system, EliPay. “Bitcoin cash is number one,” he said, looking back at the camera, “ethereum was number two, the eli token was number three, and I don’t even recall what the number four token was,” and proceeds to chuckle.

People Spending Cryptocurrency Enrages Crypto Twitter

The rest is pretty standard, as the only hiccup is in Ver’s Japanese SIM card roaming, causing a few seconds delay. The transaction is less than a penny, and he pays without incident. Ver does, however, remark, “Uh, oh, it’s slower than last time,” at the lag between the confirmation on his phone (based in Tokyo, Japan) and the Slovenian supermarket kiosk display. “Quite a bit slower than last time,” Ver says to viewers. “Sometimes it’s faster, sometimes it’s slower.” The receipt prints, and he’s on with the rest of his trip.

“Yes of course BitcoinCash is #1,” came the trolls. “Nobody wants to spend Bitcoin because it’s actually valuable. People want to spend what is worthless.” Another gasped, “Holy shit that took a long time to process, longer than credit card.” Seizing again on time, really a blink by most standards, and something Ver did not hide, a comment blasted, “Lucky you didn’t buy anything that needed to go into the freezer. Would of been defrosted by the time your Btrash payment went through.” BTC maxis were indeed set off, with the remark, “Because people want to get rid of their shitcoins and keep their Bitcoins…. think logical! Only financially independent Bitcoiners will use their Bitcoin,” being most representative of the thread.

I think maybe you're mentally handicapped as clearly from the video you can see it took just over 30 seconds for the BCH tx to process with the admittedly slow internet speed he had there. Video with timecode: pic.twitter.com/G8wkMMkiVN — David Shares (@DavidShares) September 30, 2019

Mike Dudas, CEO of The Block, a cryptocurrency news outlet, jumped-in, insisting, “It took

@rogerkver less than 1 minute to scan nearly a dozen item at the grocery store. It took

@rogerkver more than 1 minute to complete the entire act of paying using his #BitcoinCash wallet. Bitcoin Cash has actually created a payment problem where none existed previously.” It was a, frankly, bizarre comment, and flatly wrong.

Add it to the long list of people that don’t want you to use Bitcoin but still want to control it. pic.twitter.com/ZXVev8Iezn — David Shares (@DavidShares) September 30, 2019

Subreddit r/BTC moderator David Shares was having none of Dudas’s snark. “I think maybe you’re mentally handicapped as clearly from the video you can see it took just over 30 seconds for the BCH tx to process with the admittedly slow internet speed he had there. Video with timecode.” It’s strange BTC maxis or anyone else heavily invested in BTC would care at all about BCH and its use. But they do, especially when it does everything they’ve said for years it would not, could not. My hunch is they do because they know Bitcoin Cash, when divorced from personalities, ad hominems, politics, and bag holders, is the constant reminder of what BTC might have been: a peer-to-peer electronic cash system.

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DISCLOSURE: The author holds cryptocurrency as part of his financial portfolio, including BCH.