Bitcoin Tracker: Bitcoin Cash, What’s Next For Retailers?

All is not running business as usual in the bitcoin realm. The digital currency that has been around for nearly a decade has struggled to gain major traction in the mainstream industry outside of finance. Just last week, we reported on investors splitting off from bitcoin to create their own digital money dubbed Bitcoin Cash. The hope with this new bitcoin offering is to ramp up the number of transactions occurring in a shorter time frame.

This week, bitcoin officially made the split, which is being referred to by many in the cryptocurrency arena as a “hard fork” and Bitcoin Cash began trading in the stock market. While on its first day of trading, Bitcoin Cash’s stock price soared up to $215 by the end of the day, it soared to over $700 by midday Wednesday. One place where traditional bitcoin miners won’t see Bitcoin Cash being traded on is Coinbase. The digital currency exchange shared that it is not moving forward with listing Bitcoin Cash for sale because its entire system would need to be reworked in order to process the faster transactions. Many newly minted Bitcoin Cash consumers are understandably upset and some are threatening to sue.

What this new offering does is allow the amount of transactions to happen at a faster rate. While 1,700 transactions are made possible currently for every bitcoin block at approximately three transactions a minute, it was not fast enough. With companies like Visa processing thousands of transactions every second of the day, the rise of the new digital currency Bitcoin Cash is helping to push the cryptocurrency boundary.

Now that Bitcoin Cash is in the picture, the issue that comes to mind is how this will affect the seedling of innovations that are popping up in mainstream use of digital currency. Current bitcoin owners will receive an equal amount of Bitcoin Cash at the beginning of the split. Whether or not businesses already accept bitcoin for everyday transactions, they will need to accept Bitcoin Cash for everyday mainstream transactions.

While many are talking about the worth of Bitcoin Cash being traded on the stock market floor and whether or not it will survive, all seems to be quiet on the retail front. In fact, very few are discussing the future of Bitcoin Cash in the retail industry. This is probably due to the fact that cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum are not accepted or regulated in various parts of the globe. Upon both of these instances moving forward, only then will the retail industry be able to have a major conversation around Bitcoin Cash and whether or not it will be included in the digital payments arena.

As it stands now, just two days into its existence, Bitcoin Cash is already moving up the ladder to be the third spot in the list of top cryptocurrencies around the world.  The blockchain technology that bitcoin, and subsequently Bitcoin Cash, are built off of is a decentralized system and that fact has not been known to sit well with governments and bank regulators. As digital payments continue to be a pervasive force due to the prominence of eCommerce transactions, it’s likely that we may see cryptocurrencies slip into mainstream usage but without regulations in place that won’t be for quite some time.