Ethereum Co-Founder Vitalik Buterin Calls Bitcoin Cash a Failure

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has admitted that Bitcoin Cash ended up being “mostly a failure” in a lengthy Twitter thread that takes a retrospective look at his earlier predictions.        

Today, I would call BCH mostly a failure. My main takeaway: communities formed around a rebellion, even if they have a good cause, often have a hard time long term, because they value bravery over competence and are united around resistance rather than a coherent way forward.

— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) January 1, 2022

In one of his tweets, Buterin writes that the leading Bitcoin fork was focused on being a protest movement formed out of a rebellious mindset, thus lacking a coherent way of moving forward.

Bitcoin Cash was launched in August 2017 as an alternative to the world’s first cryptocurrency that is capable of supporting higher transaction volume and lower fees because of its bigger block size.

After Bitcoin Cash enjoyed initial success and managed to surpass Ethereum by market capitalization in mid-November 2017, Buterin tweeted that the contentious fork had emerged as a “legitimate contender” for the Bitcoin name.    

Fast-forward to 2022, Bitcoin Cash has slipped to 25th place by market capitalization. It is down an eye-popping 98% against Bitcoin since its peak in November 2017.

Prescient and not-so-prescient predictions     

Buterin also revisited some of his other predictions, some of which were made almost a decade ago.

The 27-year-old Canadian-Russian programmer addressed his controversial comment about expensive Bitcoin fees made in 2017, claiming that he still stands by them in the light of Ethereum’s scaling issues.

Buterin also admitted that his initial proof-of-stake and sharding roadmap was laughably wrong.

The Ethereum co-founder predicted that altcoins would become big even before they were cool (all the way back in 2013).

On top of that, Buterin foresaw the emergence of a decentralized exchange like Uniswap, something that he feels especially proud of.

However, the programmer had failed to predict non-fungible tokens, which have taken the industry by storm in 2021.