Watch: Australian City Now Has 40+ BCH Vendors

By Kapil Gauhar

A native of Australia, CoinSpice’s Hayden Otto, published a video featuring himself bridging the economy of North Queensland, Australia, without using fiat currency at all.

He was able to drink, dine, travel, get accommodations, and even have his laundry done – everything with Bitcoin Cash.

At one point in the video, he seems to be paying nearly AUD 4,000 to take a helicopter tour of the region, followed by a motorcycle ride.

A lot of retailers would accept digital currencies other than Bitcoin Cash, but, according to Otto’s reporting, BCH has a large community as a result of its local meetup.

Bitcoin Cash is Cheaper than Fiat or Bitcoin

The transaction fees on Bitcoin Cash are laughably small. For individuals who held Bitcoin before the original fork, it’s mainly “free money.” Using BCH is shown to be easy as well as convenient. Most importantly, merchants look to understand it completely.

While the Bitcoin community lauds its 2nd layer solutions like Lightning Network, which will conceivably create another generation of adoption delays among the merchants, Bitcoin Cash users just get down to the business.

It is still possible to use Bitcoin directly on-chain. It’s just that fees are occasionally very high and unpredictable. By comparison to other cryptocurrencies, that is. What Bitcoin lacks as a usable currency, it makes up for like a store of long-term value.

A Homogenous Cryptocurrency Ecosystem

As noted previously, Lightning Network adoption will take some time. Yet, there are over 14,000 local businesses across the world which currently accept Bitcoin Core, according to Coinmap.

Many of these are likely to accept BCH too since the infrastructure is not all that different by far. However, just 960 of the 2000 retailers accept Bitcoin Cash, according to AcceptBitcoin.cash.

At the same time, this initiative is an example of the drive within the BCH Community. It is willing to prove itself as a viable alternative to Bitcoin. Nonetheless, markets have not been so kind to the price of BCH. Particularly, since the Bitcoin SV hard fork, whereby neither version of Bitcoin Cash has ever recovered.

After years in the background, the merchant adoption is once again becoming a hot topic. Starbucks too is spearheading a Bakkt-led initiative for creating payment crypto-enabled payment rails for the merchants. Hardliners may still like to see ‘closed-loop’ initiative, in which some merchants are able to accept crypto payments and use them for paying their costs as well as labour.

Frances Coppola, a crypto sceptic, recently received a ton of flak on Twitter for calling Bitcoin ‘a cult.’ One of her more interesting points was about valuing cryptocurrencies in fiat money is what underlines a lack of actual faith in the currencies. This is also hardening the belief that speculators remain the mass of crypto adopters.

Here’s the video from CoinSpice. A bit Cringe, but still enjoyable.