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Comment by dahdum | Hacker News Reader

Just this May their CEO was singing a different tune:

"We have carefully studied the most significant alternatives to the Bitcoin Blockchain and have concluded that none of them are compelling" [1]

He's been a bitcoin maximalist for a while, so it's notable to see him finally cave due to the mining fees.

[1] https://cointelegraph.com/news/bitpay-ceo-we-studied-bitcoin...

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He 'caved in' because bitpay was bought by bitmain, the largest centralized chinese miner.

Bought or invested in? Bitpay was shooting themselves in the foot by not branching out into other digital assets while fees and transaction time skyrocketed. If it took Bitmain to force the issue congrats to them.

The chinese government wanted a crypto they could track, because they want to own all of the mining infrastructure, all of the nodes, all of the code base and the payment gateway to it. So that's what they got. Bcash.

Who mines a block or where the nodes are etc is irrelevant, the ledger is open and public for both Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash. This isn't the place for wild anti-Chinese conspiracy theories.

This does seem like a more plausible explanation. Bitcoin Cash is worse for their application than Litecoin in pretty much every way: it has slower blocks so there's more chance of the price shifting before the transaction confirms, it has less exchange support, they had to create their own address format for it that existing Bitcoin Cash wallets don't even support sending to in order to ensure people didn't accidentally send bitcoins there, and so on. However, it does have the major advantage for Bitcoin miners that their existing mining hardware can be used for it.

> Bitcoin Cash is worse for their application than Litecoin in pretty much every way

Litecoin will have the same scalability problems as bitcoin core, and it hasn't attracted a cutting edge-team that will be likely to try a different approach to improve the situation. Litecoin is a clone using recycled code and ideas from bitcoin. Clones with stale ideas don't generally eclipse their originators.

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