First Block of Bitcoin Cash — 478,558

Bitcoin’s hard fork has been completed successfully. Say hello to your new cryptocurrency which is very similar yet different to Bitcoin, the Bitcoin Cash. Everybody who is supporting the alternative had trouble breathing as they long waited for the currency’s first block to be mined. Six hours to be exact.

They were finally able to breathe as the first block of Bitcoin Cash was mined at roughly around 2:14 p.m. (ET) today. This made it official that some miners have moved on from Bitcoin to further accomplish their mining journeys with Bitcoin Cash which has a different technical roadmap, development team, users, and community. The first block was mined by a mining company called ViaBTC and this was an event which occurred approximately six hours after Bitcoin’s block number 478,558 — the block whereby miners pushed their attempts to separate (fork).

The first block of Bitcoin Cash contained over 6,900 transactions, doubled number of transactions as compared to Bitcoin’s original chain. The currency is currently ranked as the third most traded cryptocurrency on CoinMarketCap with its market cap exceeding $7 billion USD. Its price initially dropped to around $210 USD but quickly recovered and is currently being traded at around $900 USD as we speak. The currency is currently available for trade on these exchanges: Bittrex, Kraken, ViaBTC, BTER, HitBTC, YoBit, Cryptopia, Novaexchange, The Rock Trading, Stocks.Exchange, CoinExchange

At this point of time, it is rather meaningless to fight over which currency is better than the other. Many who thought Bitcoin Cash would crash were disappointed to see the opposite happening, though it’s also important to note that the bloat in pricing could be due to more people buying into Bitcoin Cash out of fear of losing out and not enough people being able to sell their Bitcoin Cash as only selected exchanges are ready for trade. Many believe that Bitcoin Crash will see a steep decline if more exchanges allow BCC/BCH trade. However, many were also wrong about a lot of things about the fork.

One simply cannot underestimate the power of greed. It doesn’t matter that Bitcoin Cash was a duplication from the original blockchain stack, and that money was made out of thin air so to speak. It doesn’t matter that the integrity of Bitcoin and digital currency has been, in my opinion, sullied. It doesn’t matter that this whole fork smells like a not-so-elaborate ploy by miners to maintain the worth of their equipment and for some key players to profit from this. None of these matter because the prospect of getting Bitcoin Cash from merely holding Bitcoin prompted many people to buy into Bitcoin in the days leading up the 1st of August causing prices to bloat like crazy.

It seems that the crowd has spoken. It’s still too early for a celebration and like I always say, the cryptocurrency world is a crazy crazy place. You either love it or you hate it. Instead of having this Bitcoin civil war, I would rather the cryptocurrency community remember that the main enemy is the central bank.

(Author’s Note: The picture below is taken from a creative writing class I was teaching today. The kids wanted to write about space travel and I couldn’t resist drawing the bitcoin logo on the rocket. I’m such a crypto geek, it’s a wonder how my wife can stand me. It’s about all I ever talk about these days.)

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