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Comment by Frogolocalypse | Hacker News Reader

bcash handles a fraction of the transactions of either bitcoin or litecoin. If you want a cheap option, litecoin is great. It's been around for years, and isn't controlled by the chinese government. In bcash, the nodes, the developers, the miners, and now the payment processor, are all owned by the same chinese company.

Currently litecoin is processing about four times the transaction count of bcash. They also have a block creation time of 1/4 of the time (2.5 minutes) to bcash or bitcoin (10 minutes), so if speed of confirmation is an issue for you, then they might meet your use-case. It obviously doesn't have the decentralization of bitcoin, but at least it isn't controlled by a single chinese company.

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bcash still has lower fees. I am using exodus and I am getting quoted 2 cents for bcash. Litecoin I am getting quote of 22 cents while bitocin is like 5 bucks.

Though I would agree that litecoin is better than the original bitcoin. However, litecoin does not beat bcash, IMO.

There are lots of altcoins that have low fees. When you are getting a single company to process your payments, it is always likely to be at a lower cost. The only question is why they're even bothering to store the information in a blockchain. It would just be easier if they used an SQL database. Without the decentralization, it is the same risk profile. They know who you are, what you're spending your money on, and they can black-list your spending addresses with trivial ease. Like paypal. Just less efficient.

Those altcoins don't have the userbase that bcash has. Bcash actually has an active community that is pushing to integrate bcash into mainstream commerce and that's what I like. Store of value is nice but medium of exchange is what really appeals to me personally.

> the userbase that bcash has

The number of transactions on the bcash blockchain gives a different impression of the 'user base'. If you want a faster blockchain with a larger user base, use litecoin. It isn't as secure as bitcoin, because it isn't as decentralized as bitcoin, but at least you don't have all of your purchases recorded (who you are, what you buy, who you buy it from, when you buy it, etc.) by the chinese government. Oh, and you don't have to worry about the chinese government blacklisting your wallet so that they can never be spent either.

Can you please explicate the means by which the chinese government could effectively trap your cash in your wallet. Couldn't you give money to any number of intermediaries?

It can be trivially done by the existing miners not committing transactions to the blockchain that they control. Because a single company, bitmain, controls more than 50% of the hashing power of bcash, they would only build on blocks that don't contain transactions from their blacklist.

That is what bcash is right now. A captured blockchain. You transact on it at the sufferance of the chinese government. If you think they won't exert that power, if they think it suits their interests, I'm not sure understanding this will convince you.

How does bitmain control over 50% of Bitcoin cash?

https://cash.coin.dance/blocks/today

Doesn't look like any pool is dominating unless Bitmain controls many smaller pools.

However, I'd argue that any domination is a side effect of Bitmain being the 1000pound gorilla in BTC to start with. THeir BTC pool is at 20%. (there are a LOT of people unhappy with Bitmain's business practices).

I mean there is no cost effective hash/kw alternative to Bitmain S9s.

The scary thing is that my friends and colleagues are buying S9s because no real alternative exists if you want to mine BTC(and I suppose Bitcoin Cash too)

More than 50% of the hashpower for bitcoin core is in China, so it is just as vulnerable!

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