This is the "history" of Bitcoin Cash you get when you promote David Gerard's views
The notes below refer to the "The Bitcoin Cash split" section in the above article by Mr Gerard. Some corrections were in order.
Falsely blames Bitcoin Cash's creation for the community schisms that were already present between on-chain scaling proponents and Core
Wrongly attributes "code forks, retributive DDOS attacks, death threats, a split between the Chinese miners and the American core programmers …" to Bitcoin Cash, when all of these occurred long before during the preceding years "scaling wars"
"Finally, in late 2017, large holder Roger Ver, in concert with large mining pool and mining hardware manufacturer Bitmain, promoted Bitcoin Cash" - makes it sound, via omission in the history, as if Roger Ver "finally" created BCH together with the Chinese. BCH was created by 4 big block development teams and miners. It did have initial support from Bitmain (and ViaBTC), but Roger only switched to supporting it after Segwit2X failed. Roger had no hand in creating Bitcoin Cash (except by way of moral support for Bitcoin as a real p2p cash system and his support to those who fought for that before BCH came into existence)
"Bitcoin Cash launched in September 2017, and wanted to take over the “BTC” ticker on exchanges" - embarrasingly gets the month wrong (BCH was forked on 1 August 2017), and misrepresents that Bitcoin Cash launched with its own ticker from the get go. How can one even get such a simple fact wrong when trying to give a "history"? Beats me.
"Mostly, the few retail users of Bitcoin would get confused between the two, and end up sending money to an address on the wrong chain." - amplifies the FUD spread at the time by Core supporters about users getting confused between the two chains. This occurred far less frequently (however, can't ever completely exclude stupidity) since the chains had separate names, tickers, logos, different signature schemes (for replay protection), and even address formats were made different after a while.
"Bitcoin Cash completely failed to gain traction as a retail crypto" - completely untrue. As recent evidence from payment processors shows, BCH is basically the #2 crypto after BTC in terms of retail transactions in the world. You can judge ongoing adoption efforts yourself.
"[Bitcoin Cash] failed to get any takeup in the darknet markets" - this is also untrue, not sure why Mr Gerard sees it necessary to spread a falsehood about this. He could just google the facts. I'll add some to this post later, the Internet doesn't forget. It's true that dark net markets pivoted to other privacy coins later on, under increased pressure from authorities. However, that doesn't mean there was no initial uptake of Bitcoin Cash. During BTC's high fee period, there certainly was.
"None of the disputes were really technical — it was all the politics of who got to make money." - Another falsehood. Many of the disputes were technical, essentially non-engineers like Mr Gerard claiming "Bitcoin can never work" versus software engineers, many having experience in scaling systems, holding the opinion that Bitcoin could scale, given the appropriate technical attention.
"They figured that if they shouted enough abuse at each other, they’d get rich faster, or something." - for Mr Gerard, this seems to be the only motive. He of course neglects that many people who try to build and improve Bitcoin Cash, are not in need of more money and do so because they believe it is important for other reasons. He discounts (actually: neglects to recount) these reasons. If you don't know what reasons I'm talking about, watch some early Bitcoin videos to educate yourself.
"Bitcoin Cash fell flat on its face." - Hasn't happened. BCH was only displaced out of the top 10 relatively late in recent history, and only because the market is severely distorted. Fundamentally, BCH is still strong, and successful adoption efforts in many countries bear this out - another inconvenient fact that Mr Gerard needs to omit for his narrative.
"Bitmain ended up with 1 million BCH “inventory” — that is, a pile of coins there was no market for — and fired its entire BCH team in late 2018." - A very curious assertion, that there was no market for those BCH, since many believe that Bitmain sold those coins. How does that work without a market? Also, the "BCH team" that Gerard alleges was fired in 2018, doesn't seem to have been a BCH team at all, but a Bitmain development unit in Israel which was probably focused on hardware, firmware and software for the Bitcoin mining equipment which is Bitmain's main business. Certainly I haven't seen commits to the BCH clients from developers of that unit. The linked CCN article also makes no such claim (it is essentially a reference that doesn't support the claim).
"The main thing keeping it alive is that it’s listed on Coinbase." A garbage assertion. Bitcoin Cash is a peer to peer electronic cash system, and while centralized exchanges like Coinbase are important, they are not what keeps a p2p coin alive. BCH has been delisted from exchanges already, and it will probably happen again in future. The point of cryptocurrency is not to make yourself dependent on such "crypto banks" again. This lesson will be re-learned until it has stuck.
"the BCashers decided that calling BCH-Coin “BCash” was a slur." The campaign to discredit Bitcoin Cash by removing its association with the "Bitcoin" name was well documented and continues to this day, with significant aid from those who are not properly informed on the details of the matter. The simple fact is that this slurring occurred because Bitcoin Cash was a real threat to BTC, not like the countless "Bitcoin XXX" clones that were popped up later to muddle the public or to make a quick buck (in some cases both).
He does not provide a source URL for the Bitcoin Cash graphical logo with transparency which he trots out in support of the "BCash" name. If you grab such one image where the "Bitcoin" was in white on purpose (for use on dark backgrounds) out of a media kit, to make such a point, then you're intentionally ignoring that the actual logo design with text showed "Bitcoin Cash" quite clearly, and graphic designers know which image to select to best match their backgrounds (hint: unlike Mr Gerard on his website). UPDATE: Mr Gerard has provided a Wayback machine URL in his response below. My remarks on the use of this image on a white background still apply (see my response).
(Original article archived here and here so that we can see whether Mr Gerard corrects the wrong information in his article.)
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