Emil Oldenburg, co-founder and chief technology officer at Bitcoin.com, has sold his bitcoin and switched to Bitcoin Cash because he is skeptical about its future, according to Breakit, a Swedish website.
Oldenburg said bitcoin is now the riskiest investment a person can make.
He said bitcoin’s transaction times, costs and lead times have undercut bitcoin’s value as an investment.
Bitcoin transaction fees have doubled every three months, and it now takes an average 4.5 hours to confirm a transaction. Fees reached $26 per trade recently, according to Ars Technica.
Bitcoin.com has tens of millions of unique visitors per month, according to Similarweb. and its leading revenue stream is its mining pool.
Oldenburg said Bitcoin.com’s revenue numbers are large, but he did not wish to reveal details. His own salary and those of 60 colleagues in Tokyo have been in bitcoin.
Bitcoin Liquidity At Stake
Bitcoin’s market liquidity is at stake, he said.
People have not recognized bitcoin’s inherent risks since most have only purchased it and have not tried to sell it or trade with it. Once they realize the risks, they will begin to sell it.
The bitcoin network is unusable, he said. The problems occur when transactions are recorded on the blockchain. There is a limited number of transactions a person can make per second that relies on the block size that stores the transactions. This limit has made bitcoin an illiquid and unusable cryptocurrency.
The number of bitcoins a person trades per second is limited, causing high transaction costs and lengthy transaction lead times. Investors are now crowding the market and making transactions costlier and slower.
Bitcoin Suffers From Misguided Management
While these problems could be addressed, Oldenburg does not think they will be because the network is run by what he calls “fanatical bitcoin talibans.”
The people running the bitcoin network view bitcoin as digital gold and a technical experiment rather than something people use.
Bitcoin.com has stopped developing services for bitcoin to focus on Bitcoin Cash, which split from bitcoin in August and has become the second largest cryptocurrency.
It only costs $0.012, 10 Swedish ore, the krona’s centesimal subdivision, to send a Bitcoin Cash transaction, and there are no lead times required. The only downside is that larger hard drives are needed, which Oldenburg said is not a problem for most people.
Bitcoin Cash’s larger block size limit, presently 8Mb, offers lower transaction fees, he said.
As long as the bitcoin network is run by the present managers, bitcoin will not be a currency for everyday use, as many had hoped. Instead, Oldenburg sees the future in Bitcoin Cash.
Others Also Favor Bitcoin Cash
Craig Wright, an Australian businessman who once claimed to be Satoshi Nakamoto, recently tweeted that 2018 will be the year in which Bitcoin Cash is brought to its full potential, as its limits will be removed and its security will be improved.
Wright pointed out that among what’s coming for the cryptocurrency in 2018 are “secure threshold systems to make even web wallets secure,” improved mixers, and transactions blinding to improve privacy. When asked who’s the team working on these improvements, and when a public roadmap and testnet would be available, Wright replied, “Several. More public soon.”
Bitcoin Cash proponents Roger Ver and Calvin Ayre have announced a plan to use their influence and considerable wealth to rebrand Bitcoin Cash as “bitcoin”.
Ver, who owns Bitcoin.com and is an early bitcoin investor once nicknamed “Bitcoin Jesus,” has incurred the ire of much of the bitcoin community over the past several years, primarily due to his repeated support for contentious hard forks associated with the evolving block size debate. Critics claim Bitcoin.com gives new users the impression that it is an official Bitcoin resource.
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