Amidst a heated backlash and legal threats, Roger Ver’s Bitcoin.com, a proponent of Bitcoin Cash (BCH), recently updated its block explorer page in an effort to remove any language that suggests that Bitcoin Cash is the real bitcoin (BTC). Roger Ver, a renowned cryptocurrency enthusiast who made millions from investments in bitcoin has been an avid supporter of the BCH, which is a fork of bitcoin.
The Bitcoin.com CEO believes that BCH is the digital currency that remains trues to the original Bitcoin Whitepaper idea of being a peer-to-peer electronic cash system. He also adopted an approach to marketing the digital currency in a way that the entire crypto ecosystem with the exception of other BCH holders would consider to be unethical. For instance, he has worked on renaming some of the cryptocurrencies like BTC to “Bitcoin Core” and BCH to “Bitcoin” on websites, wallets, and apps as well as well as on social media platforms.
The reason why this is such a big deal is that it has seen a number of crypto users to incur monetary losses when they send money from their bitcoin wallets to some BCH wallets believing that it is the original currency they are dealing in. For newbies, this is further aggravated by the fact that Roger Ver’s website is among Google’s top search results for “Bitcoin” – the websites BCH wallet also happens to be the first search results for “how to buy bitcoin.”
Before the company listed BCH as “Bitcoin” on its explorer page, it rolled out a “Bitcoin Wallet” for iOS that misleadingly defaulted to Bitcoin Cash addresses. This marketing approach has been deemed as a fraudulent move that will certainly result in the loss of funds. The backlash has since spawned a website that seeks to gather as much evidence as possible from as many people as possible so as to file a lawsuit against Roger Ver and Bitcoin.com.
As mentioned earlier, Bitcoin Cash forked off the original Bitcoin blockchain but owing to changes that were recently introduced to BTC, proponents of BCH have argued that the fork has more resemblance to Satoshi Nakamoto’s original vision for Bitcoin. BCH supporters have been using this argument to justify their claim of the “Bitcoin” label for BCH while dubbing BTC “Bitcoin Core.”
Politics aside, it is quite obvious that the concerns raised are relevant and by agreeing to drop the misleading language from its website, Bitcoin.com will definitely help to solve the confusion that cryptocurrencies have to deal with. Better yet, the fight over labels is petty and supporters of both coins need to work towards ways of co-existing.