Bcash (BCH) just halved and nobody noticed…

Since 2017 when Bitcoin was hard forked and Bitcoin Cash (BCH) was born there has been a great deal of rivalry and speculation as to should we care about the fundamental principles carried on by both versions. Most people in the crypto community support the BTC version which is the dominant chain and subsequently carries on the Bitcoin label.

However, for quite some time the BCH version (Bitcoin Cash) successfully managed to sway opinions in its favour and attracted a lot of interest and support from some of the older members of the crypto community. Through rogue marketing and aggressive anti-BTC media campaigns, the leaders of this fork have been winning a strong fanbase around the world since its conception. And yet, they kept hitting a brick wall when it comes to winning the majority vote. This was further diminished by their inner bickering and competition which led to the coin being forked into two in November 2018.
This gave birth to BSV (Bitcoin Satoshi Vision) – yet another coin with the bold claims to be the “real Bitcoin” while having even less hashing power.

Both of these forks are now having their own halving events this month while BTC is due to have its halving next month.

Typically such events are preceded by a noticeable rise in value, at least for a short time in the run-up to the event. This has been the case for Bitcoin (BTC) in the last two occasions and for LTC too (most recent was last May).

However, it seems that BCH, which just had its halving today (just as I’m writing this post) did not create the excitement that was expected.

In a previous post on this blog I pointed out that there have been multiple instances when BCH blocks have not been mined for a long period of time. This speaks of lack of mining interest in BCH and to add more salt to an open wound, its first halving event is also failing to create waves. As we can see from the current stats, the coin’s value has not increased as much as that of the BSV fork. In the past week it’s up by 22% while BSV printed nearly 30% increase. The last 30 days stats are even worse: BCH is on a negative while BSV is at +9%

We can’t ignore the fact that we experienced a market crash that was triggered by the global pandemic crisis. This caused a huge panic-selling of many assets, including digital assets and all cryptocurrencies went in the red. They are still recovering and this is the main cause of the negative monthly figures. At the same time, we have to give credit where credit is due and in this case, BSV is making the best recovery of the three – users are clearly excited about the upcoming halving and they’re betting on it. Which is why the coin is up by 30% in the past week and almost 10% since yesterday.

It is most likely that BSV already reached its peak as its halving is due tomorrow (at the time of writing) so this post is not meant as an encouragement to go and buy BSV (don’t get me wrong, I am not in favour of this fork).

Not all halvings are created equal.

All in all, the biggest takeaway from this observation I am making here, is that not all halvings have the same effect on the market value of the coins. What really matters is if the coin has more demand than supply and from what we are seeing with both BCH and BSV is that their supply seems to be just about right to cover the demand since both coins are trading roughly at the same value they were a few months ago and if we compare them to BTC – they’re both quite low, so their halving events did not bring any significant price action.

The Bitcoin (BTC) halving is due on 11 May so we are going to keep an eye on how the market will react to this and as I pointed out in this post, there are a few directions this could go, so I will update you on that too.