A year ago, bitcoin split into two. That’s about the only thing the bitcoin and bitcoin cash communities agree on.
On August 1, 2017, "Bitcoin Jesus" (Roger Ver) issued two Twitter edicts. First, he instructed[1] his followers to use the /r/btc subreddit rather than the "censored" /r/bitcoin subreddit. A few hours later, Ver shared an article from Bitcoin.com about SegWit[2], (a soft fork that changed Bitcoin's code to allow for faster confirmation times). In his second tweet, Ver appended a lone hashtag: #BitcoinCash.
No celebratory tweets from Ver. No emoji with party hats and streamers. Just the simple hashtag to commemorate the launch of a new cryptocurrency: bitcoin cash. Bitcoin cash uses a larger block size than bitcoin, allowing for faster transaction speeds (at the potential expense of decentralization).
When bitcoin forked[3] a year ago today, creating bitcoin and bitcoin cash, it was unclear how that fork would play out, with hodlers left to draw conclusions based on who joined which side. Several early bitcoin adopters, like Erik Voorhees, signaled support for BTC:
Gavin Andresen took a wait-and-see approach:
But everyone knew where Roger Ver stood:
Both sides – those backing BTC and those behind BCH – laid claim to Satoshi's glorious legacy and positioned their token as the one, true bitcoin. Though, it's worth noting Vorhees later expressed support for the existence of both coins, despite his preference for bitcoin.
So, why didn't bitcoin cash become known as bitcoin? After all, when Ethereum forked[4], the original Ethereum became "Ethereum classic"[5] and those in favor of reversing The DAO got to keep the name. Yet somehow the original bitcoin is still bitcoin.
The simplest answer may be inertia. ETC backers asked the Ethereum community to prioritize
