Increasing Merchant Adoption of Bitcoin Cash

When Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash split, we made sure that there was no possibility of user losing money because their BCC transactions would somehow be valid on the BTC chain. Or vice versa.

This has done great things for the trust people have in the chain.

Shortly after Bitcoin Cash started (Aug 1st), some merchants came and realized we missed one important usecase. The payment protocol. We soon fixed that too.

The payment protocol is an expensive word for what people use when they go to a store, or pay on the internet. The most used version of this is a QR code.

When your Bitcoin wallet on your phone scans this, it will decypher it into something like;

bitcoincash:15XGXtqKEp7Dv8TP2vMZb1du1LdtjA7v5w

By incorporating the full word "bitcoincash:" in there we distinguish ourselves from the legacy chain that uses only "bitcoin:".
People scanning a barcode then will not accidentally end up in their BCC wallet when they were asked to pay BTC. Or vice versa.

This has been rolled out in all the major Bitcoin full node clients, we communicated this on the coordinating mailinglist and I've personally been reaching out to companies and wallets when I could.

But this is still not enough. There are too many companies, exchanges, merchants and wallets that do not know about this new payment URI and I'm worried that people may lose money and this will obviously hurt merchant adoption.

I think together we may have a bigger effect. If you notice a Bitcoin Cash payment address, please check if they are using the Bitcoin Cash URI. Just scan it with your favourite QR scanning application and check if it starts like the quoted one above, with "bitcoincash:".