In the last five days there has been a lot of discussion about whether Bitcoincash can overcome Bitcoin producing the Cashening event (and on the sidelines Ethereum is watching, they want to achieve the Flippening, where they take the #1 spot).
This article looks at what Bitcoincash has to achieve to pull off the Cashening.
Hashrate
Today (November 13th) Bitcoincash does a consensus hard fork to fix it's Emergency Difficulty Adjustment. The EDA enabled it to survive after the hardfork in August, by rapidly lowering the dificulty so that blocks could be found with a lower hashrate, but it has been gamed by the miners.
The new Difficulty Adjustment adjusts block by block. So instead of waiting for a certain amount of blocks to be mined before there is a cliff edge up or a cliff edge down, it adjusts looking at the moving average of the time between blocks for last 144 blocks. It is aiming for a constant 10 minutes per block, and so should adjust quickly to both drops and rises in hashrate.
The miners will have a harder time trying to game the hashrate down, and will instead start mining on purely profitability.
The Price
Since it forked in August, BCH has been hovering in the $200 - $300 range, after making an initial all time high of $1000. But in the last few days it has surged up to a new all time high of $2600 before dropping back to the $1300 range. My guess is that from now on Bitcoincash is going to try to make $1000 a floor that it doesn't go below, and to try to get the price into the $3000 to $4000 range by the end of the year. They need the high price to both attract the miners and to be a store of value.
Merchant Adoption
Bitcoincash's Unique Selling Point (USP) is it's big 8 mg blocks. We've seen how it can fit about 37,000 transactions in an 8 mg block, as it proved back in August.
But this USP is of no use at all if people don't actually use it.
That means to really prove itself, Bitcoincash needs merchant adoption - they need BCH to be an option in all the checkout systems. They have managed to get some smaller payment providers like Coinpayments to add their coin, but the big payment providers like Bitpay have so far not adopted them.
Interestingly, when Overstock enabled altcoins in August 2017, it included bitcoincash, along with other alts (they are using shapeshift to process them).
It will be interesting to see if other retailers follow.
If the Cashening happens, it will happen in the merchant space - bitcoin network fees are now $25 - $100, especially when the network gets congested, which makes it completely useless for purchases under $100.