Bitcoin Cash (BCH) is a scam pushed primarily by Roger Ver and Jihan Wu. Their roles are different, but the goal is the same: to make more money by dividing Bitcoin against itself. The concept of manufactured competition within a brand was pioneered in the 1930’s by Neil McElroy of Procter and Gamble, later US Secretary of Defense. This idea finds a clear expression in the creation and marketing of BCH, though the open source nature of Bitcoin allows further improprieties for BCH.
Bitcoin Cash was created when a minority cabal decided to fork off of Bitcoin in August 2017, creating a nearly-identical knockoff that appropriated the Bitcoin brand. BCH, a completely separate blockchain from Bitcoin that is incompatible with Bitcoin both pre- and post-fork, nevertheless co-opted the Bitcoin name, logo, address format and userbase.
Bitcoin Cash was gifted to holders of BTC at the time of the fork, conjuring a market and userbase out of thin air. Roger “insider trading is a non-crime” Ver, the most conspicuous proponent of the fork, was one of the top holders of BTC at that time, gifting himself an equal amount of BCH for each BTC he held, and thus stood to benefit greatly if Bitcoin Cash gained market value. So to pump the value of BCH, Roger began a “Wag the Dog” campaign to prop up BCH as an equivalent “rival” to BTC, and manufacture ideological conflict between two supposed camps; the rightous underdogs (Bitcoin Cash) vs the evil globalists (Bitcoin) in a phony “civil war”. Controversy sells. BCH propaganda focused on painting the manufactured BCH “community” as a silent majority drawn together in victimhood. Roger has been wildly successful in turning a malicious minority hardfork into a crusade by leveraging controversy.
Further, Ver has acted to undermine Bitcoin in order to prop up Bitcoin Cash as an equal. Central to this is the misappropriation of “Bitcoin Core” as a general name for Bitcoin; this propaganda device creates the illusion that there are two competing “versions” of the real Bitcoin, “Bitcoin Core vs. Bitcoin Cash”. In reality, Bitcoin Core is simply the most popular Bitcoin client, or software used to connect to the Bitcoin network. Referring to Bitcoin as “Bitcoin Core” is analogous to calling Bitcoin Cash “Bitcoin ABC”. The goal is to muddy the waters and diminish the Bitcoin brand, so that Bitcoin Cash can fill the gap.
Meanwhile Jihan Wu, co-founder of mining giant Bitmain, took a different approach. Bitmain holds an effective monopoly on ASIC miners, and his mining pools comprise an alarming share of hashpower in the Bitcoin network. The announcement of SegWit implementation in Bitcoin presented a direct threat to Bitmain, Antpool, BTC.com and ViaBTC, as SegWit transactions would be less profitable to mine. As an early proponent of Bitcoin Cash, Jihan sought to mitigate the threat of SegWit to his bottom line. Upon the validation of the first SegWit blocks on the Bitcoin blockchain, the miners shifted to mining Bitcoin Cash blocks. Noticeably, though a backer of Bitcoin Cash, Jihan had little reason to join in Ver’s disinfo scheme because his main interest was maximizing mining profitability; the name attached to the blocks is immaterial. Jihan even took to Twitter to push back against the nascent conflation taking root, and call on users to properly distinguish between Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash. He has even recently called SegWit an "upgrade". and softened his public stance. But the damage is done; Bitmain and the mining pools continue to cash in just the same.
So, we have a propaganda campaign waged on the surface, and a mining coup below. All that is needed is some market manipulation to leverage those schemes for gains. This is where Roger and Jihan’s approaches converge.
In coordinated attacks, Roger and his wealthy friends periodically pump the price of Bitcoin Cash, while the mining pools simultaneously inflate the hashrate of BCH and cause a momentary “flippening”. These highly conspicuous ops serve to generate controversy, bring more attention to Bitcoin Cash, and allow the “civil war” idea to slip further into the cracks of Bitcoin discourse. Most importantly of all, a precedent is established: these events are promoted in BCH circles as hype rallies, going so far as to give them absurd codenames. This normalizes the idea of overt market manipulation in BCH, and creates an insurance policy for BCH whales like Roger and Jihan. If things go south for Bitcoin Cash, they can always manufacture another pump, and dump at a good Satoshi price.
The disinformation continues to the present day, embedded in various corners of the crypto discourse: r/BTC, which began as a general Bitcoin subreddit, has been turned into an incubator for anti-Bitcoin propaganda and conspiracy theories; @Bitcoin has been taken over and turned into an anti-Bitcoin disinfo account; Bitcoin.com, another bait-and-switch outlet of Ver, tricks unwitting users into Bitcoin Cash by conflating it with Bitcoin throughout the site. The site even went so far as to default to creating a BCH wallet under the guise of a "Bitcoin wallet", only correcting this ruse after facing pushback. And of course there’s Ver himself, who uses social media (Reddit, Twitter) and newsmedia (CNBC, Infowars etc) to spread disinformation and imprint the conflation of BCH with Bitcoin in the minds of casual audiences through the constant repetition of simple, digestible talking points. Jihan Wu, for his part continues to monopolize ASIC mining, maximizing his profits and largely keeping out of the limelight.
To reiterate: creating a fake Bitcoin, gifting it to all Bitcoin holders for free, marketing it as the real Bitcoin, and then leveraging that conflation into speculative value is, in practical terms, a scam. The fork itself isn’t the problem; it’s the deceptive marketing that makes it a scamcoin. Roger Ver has claimed, in no uncertain terms, on numerous occasions, on multiple platforms, in speech and in writing, that BCH is Bitcoin.
You can’t create new Bitcoins by simply forking the Bitcoin blockchain. If that were the case, the supply of Bitcoin would be infinite and thus Bitcoin would have no value. Bitcoin’s value depends on its digital scarcity. Real Bitcoins are validated by users, and can only be created by mining them. The total supply of Bitcoin is fixed at 21,000,000; there will only be 21 million Bitcoins, ever, despite what the deceivers and their willing dupes say.
Bitcoin is Bitcoin. Bitcoin Cash is Bitcoin Cash. The end.
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