A really rather excellent post by the Selene Wallet Chief Engineer Kallisti

https://nitter.poast.org/kzKallisti/status/1986913540674822540#m

In full below:

Listen up, degens. You wanna know why $BCH, a “dead coin,” has been performing so well this cycle?

I’ve been deep in the bcash trenches since 2021. Let me tell you.

This is the Bitcoin Cash market thesis. You will be bullish on BCH by the end of this post.

Live by the Fork; Die by the Fork

The original 2009 Bitcoin is no more - there is only its surviving descendants, all of whom share the original Satoshi genesis block.

ONLY a descendant of the original genesis block may be considered “Bitcoin” at all.

The surviving descendants are differentiated by their tickers: BTC, BCH… and two more siblings that separated themselves from BCH: BSV, and XEC.

As Bitcoin is open-source software and an open-source protocol, it’s natural that any social grievances will be solved by the operators and users of the network in aggregate.

All parties will operate on the chain(s) which bring them the most value.

For some, that value is measured in price. For others, that value may be measured in freedom, or maybe in technology.

We cannot decide what others value, only what we value.

Of course, nobody can deny the value of network effects. Metcalfe’s Law and all that.

The Original Bitcoin Value Proposition

Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System, per its whitepaper, was designed to allow purely p2p electronic payments to be sent directly from one party to another without any trusted third party.

It highlights problems with competing payment systems, like high costs for dispute mediation, which limits the possibility for small casual transactions.

Bitcoin came to be known as “magic internet money.” It was incredibly cheap and quick to send money across the internet to anyone in the world. This technology was completely revolutionary in an era that predates instant bank transfers and apps like Venmo.

Advocates of Bitcoin at the time saw the enormous world-changing potential that the new currency could bring.

Some early Bitcoiners even made claims that seemed ludicrous then. Could the price of Bitcoin really soar over $1 million?

Of course, in 2025, everyone is well aware of the thesis. Bitcoin will become the global reserve currency.

Trouble in Paradise

I’m sure everyone is aware of the Blocksize Wars, and the resulting chain split in 2017.

It was entirely over differences in philosophy. (If you lived through that time, please forgive me for oversimplifying this!)

If you want the gritty details, read Hijacking Bitcoin by Roger Ver and The Blocksize War by Johnathan Bier.

The question is: does Bitcoin have more potential as “digital gold,” or as “digital cash?”

The true answer lies in an underappreciated part of the whitepaper title. Bitcoin is not just electronic cash, but an electronic cash system.

Bitcoin Script

The core design of Bitcoin is rather elegant. Instead of hard-coding all of the different types of transactions someone may want to make, Satoshi implemented a scripting language that evaluates spending conditions instead.

When we make Bitcoin transactions, the network is actually smashing together two scripts: one that lives inside the “coin” (utxo) you’re trying to spend, and one that gets created by your wallet when you try to spend it.

The script will always evaluate to 1 or 0. If it’s a 1, the transaction succeeds! If it’s a 0, the transaction fails.

The “coin” script says: if the data from the wallet script matches the data inside of me, then I will unlock!

And your wallet says: I have the data! It’s your key signature.

But what if we need to do a more complex transaction? It’s great that we’re using a scripting language, because we can set the spending conditions on both sides, allowing for very robust expression of any transaction you can think of.

The Major Flaw

In Bitcoin’s youth, it was necessary to limit the power of the scripting language, because there was fear that someone would be able to create malicious transactions that could harm the network.

But before enough research could be done to safely revert those limits, Bitcoin was thrown into political chaos which is still palpable to this day.

There are still some ongoing attempts to restore the power of Bitcoin Script on BTC…

But Bitcoin Cashers took a different approach.

The BCH Advantage: Pragmatic Engineering

BCHers, through steady, thoughtful upgrades every year since the chain split, have now been able to implement all of the remaining puzzle pieces that realize Bitcoin as a full Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System.

We solved the blocksize problem by implementing a dynamic blocksize algorithm.

We’ve restored and augmented Bitcoin Script with CheckDataSig, native introspection, miner-validated tokens, state-carrier UTXOs, arbitrary-precision arithmetic, a smart computational costing system, and support for functions and loops.

This allows developers to implement nearly any program they want, as long as they fit within the consensus cost and size constraints for the transaction, and pay the appropriate fee.

A Cambrian explosion of UTXO-based dApp development awaits… and that includes scripts that enable quantum-resistant wallets, privacy-enhanced transactions, on-chain automata, on-chain markets, escrows, auctions, etc…

When the original Bitcoiners predicted that Bitcoin would become the global reserve currency, this is what they meant.

Now ANY financial instrument can be represented on-chain. Trustlessly. Permissionlessly. Self-custodially. For very little cost, at incredible speed.

We’re not just decentralized, p2p freedom money. Bitcoin Cash is the global blockchain for all of the world’s economic computation.

Do you get it yet? THIS is the promise of crypto that we’ve all been waiting for.

Bitcoin Cash: It’s just money!

BCH is money, and BCH does everything money does! That means spending, saving, investing, commerce, estate planning, and everything in between.

It’s probably worth picking some up, just in case. ;)