TL;DR: Developer Gabriel Cardona presented the State of Bitcoin Cash (BCH) at the first-of-its-kind Bitcoin Cash City Conference in Townsville, Australia. Cardona gave historical perspective to the BCH project, highlighting key milestones, and put forward a vision of where he thinks peer-to-peer electronic cash for the world is headed.

The State of Bitcoin Cash as of September 2019

Master of Ceremonies, Vin Armani of CoinText fame, introduced Cardona as “one of the major rock stars” in the development community. It’s a bit of serendipity, actually, a full circle coming together for the two men.

Armani was one of the earliest to spot Cardona’s work with tools such as BitBox, and Cardona indeed credited Armani for bringing much-needed attention in order to land him in the position he holds today as lead developer for Bitcoin.com. And Cardona is widely respected in the space for his rapid-fire cadence in getting out severely technical issues along with seemingly always keeping a level head.

He’s so impressive, Bitcoin.com bigwigs bumped him up to a business development position, where he effectively holds two hats at the portal giant, overseeing software and various applications along with two-martini-lunching corporate accounts looking to break into the wild world of cryptocurrency.

Censorship Resistant Digital Cash for the Internet Nations

In this present capacity on 4 September 2019, however, he was called upon to be an early speaker at a historical gathering literally on the other side of the world from his home base in Northern California. Cardona was given the herculean task of taking a sober look at the current state of Bitcoin Cash. BCH, as the world’s 4th ranked most popular cryptocurrency by market capitalization, has seen a lot of life in its just barely more than two years. There is a lot of ground to cover.

He begins by looking back. “Bitcoin was originally created as a Peer-to-peer Electronic Cash System,” he reminded the audience. “For the first time ever offering the ability to send any amount of money to anyone anywhere, nearly instantly and nearly for free. Censorship resistant digital cash for the Internet Nation. Sitting where we are today with the influx of blockchain technology and all the whiz-bang features, it’s easy to forget the purity of that original vision.”

Cardona insisted there is a connection between transaction volume and the so-called Network Effect. In other words, Bitcoin was humming along before it hit scaling snags. “Bitcoin Cash was born from a confluence of events,” he explained. “Starting in 2015 it was clear that eventually the 1MB blocks would fill up. Many highly talented people proposed many solutions and there was a scaling debate that raged from 2015–2017. Segregated Witness, also known as SegWit, which was pitched as both a scaling solution and a transaction malleability fix, was scheduled to go live in Aug 2017 which acted as a tipping point leading to the fork away from Bitcoin Core BTC and into Bitcoin Cash BCH on Aug 1st 2017.”

Worth Attacking

Without laboring too much on the past, he sped up a tad to generalize how BCH has become battle-hardened, steeled by the voluminous attempts to cripple it or crush the coin altogether. The reason it’s being attacked, Cardona syllogized, is because it’s worth attacking. It’s a real threat.

One of the more dangerous topics on that score to broach is BCH’s speculative price. Cardona calls it a victim of a global cryptocurrency reset in which all projects were shaken of weak hands, tossing out less serious enthusiasts. He begins his argument at December of last year when Crypto Winter hit its nadir, and contrasted that snapshot with today. It’s an interesting perspective on, again, a touchy issue with some investors, but no less compelling.

What might be driving the price or a version of market confidence in BCH is all the development surrounding Bitcoin Cash since December. The coin, of course, split from a contentious faction, and the results for committed BCH developers have been telling. New wallet services. New functionality such as smart contracts, scripting language, and the introduction of SLP tokens. Privacy features such as tools like CashShuffle. Non-custodial exchanges. The list is increasing seemingly every month. It’s that dogged grit endemic to the Bitcoin Cash community, Cardona stressed, attracting attention.

“As I mentioned before, Bitcoin Cash has properties which make it far greater than the best money the world has ever known. It’s a value transfer network which lets you tokenize anything imaginable and send it to anyone anywhere, permissionlessly and with no middlemen, nearly instantly and nearly for free. You can’t overstate how powerful and disruptive that is,” he concluded.

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

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