Bitcoin & Bitcoin Cash Can Co-Exist, If Bitcoin Cedes "Digital Cash" Status

(At least, until the market discovers the options better than both.)

It's very easy to do a quick test to determine if you're dealing with cash.

1. Is there a counterparty?
2. Are the fees high?
3. Is the underlying highly volatile on the regular?
   (Bonus points for speed.)

If you answered yes to 2 or more of these questions, you are most assuredly not dealing with cash. If you answered yes to even one of these questions, watch out! Your "cash" is still in the "experimental" phase, pending audit by the market.

When in doubt, perhaps this image can help.

It's agonizing to watch these issues occur while Steem sits here with no fees whatsoever. The speed, fees, and lower volatility make it a better form of "cash" than most of the other cryptocurrencies we can name. The value lost each day to Bitcoin miner fees alone could probably feed all of Venezuela, to say nothing of the electricity use of Bitcoin (which is a smaller problem than often advertised, but an issue of some merit nonetheless.)

Until we can get more people to transfer value via Steem, we must live in a world of forced minimum .001 BTC fees on exchanges (nearing $20). In such a world, can anyone afford to still think of Bitcoin as digital cash?

I can tell you some customers who certainly can't - anyone involved with Steam, the world's premier video-game downloading client.

The following complaint is barely a year old:

Provided the knowledge that Steam's median sale price is about $25, does anyone want to guess what Steam has done with a payment method with almost $20 fees?

If you said "stop accepting it", you got it.

Could the market make this any more clear?

Steam is probably less likely to adopt a new cryptocurrency as early/optimistically as they did with Bitcoin. What currency could we fairly recommend for them in light of their volatility concerns?

Remember this when you hear about the "dignity of the office of the President."

The logical path forward for Bitcoin is to become digital gold, or in other words, embrace the reserve-asset role it could effectively play in the cryptocurrency market due to its first-mover advantage.

Bitcoin refuses to increase block-size, as prescribed in the white paper to scale. Seg-wit has done nothing to help. Atomic swaps are neither ready, nor can they do more than cut the problem in half. The Lightning Network remains "almost ready", as it seems to have been for quite some time.

Bitcoin's ineptitude has lost forever the first-mover advantage in the "digital cash" department. Scaling is its white whale. However, none of this need be bad. Embracing a fate as a fundamentally poor means of transferring value, to become the deflationary reserve this market needs, could be far more valuable.

After all, rare is the time in history when the people have clamored to trade in their Gold for Silver or Copper. However, thanks to Gresham's law, the reverse is often true.

"Intrinsic" value sure is a relative thing these days...at least gold/silver is a phenomenal conductor.

PS - Ethereum, I don't like what I'm seeing out of you, at ALL. Shape up or be shipped out by EOS.

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Sources: BBC, Google, CoinMarketCap, @natxlaw, Wikipedia, The Supreme Court's 2000 Election Decision
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