Why Bitcoin Cash is so important

At the start of 2017, having been an avid fan and user of Bitcoin for months prior, and loving the usability and stability of the network, I quickly realized, along with everybody else, that Bitcoin was not ready for the adoption it received. The exponential increase in transaction volume wildly exceeded that which the Bitcoin network was ready to support.

Essentially, the problem of block size came to fruition, years after the Bitcoin community debated over whether or not the block size should have been increased before problems started.

A solution was conjured up, called SegWit. Now, I might be talking out of context, or without full context, but in my opinion, and from the technical explanation I've received, SegWit eliminates the security of transactions provided by digital signatures by requiring the signatures to be confirmed by referencing a third party. Also, SegWit does not fix malleability issues, and does not solve scalability problems.

The problem with scalability could be solved immediately with an increase of the block size. If you have a 1MB block and all of a sudden have tens of MB of transactions more than before, you're going to see the slow confirmations and high transaction fees that have ensued since the network became congested early this year. Most people, though, did not want to proceed with such a change as that would require a hard fork. Instead, many pushed for SegWit to avoid upgrades. However, SegWit still requires clients to upgrade, as without a client that can read SegWit, you cannot partake in the network.

Hence, Bitcoin Cash is a direct result of the community split. Bitcoin Cash immediately solves the issue of transaction volume by increasing the block size to 8MB.

Not only does Bitcoin Cash now have the capability of supporting 8x the transaction volume as Bitcoin Original (the unforked, original chain), but since it has introduced a (so far) successful hard fork, there is room down the line for continued hard forks to address additional on-chain scaling issues, like transaction size (which I think, personally, can be solved with FlexTrans, another hard fork).

Bitcoin Cash is still very young, but it captures the essence of the split between the community. The fork captures two very different ideologies of what Bitcoin really is. I think the next few months are going to be pinnacle to Bitcoin's future, and this hard fork into Bitcoin Cash is a game-changer that could spring Bitcoin back to life, and back to a sizable market cap advantage over altcoins.

If you don't like [what Bitcoin Core is doing], fork. -- Greg Maxwell of Blockstream

It's obvious now Greg's words did not fall on deaf ears.

May the best Bitcoin win.