NOTE: This post was written in November 2020, but was not published until November 2022 as part of the Bitcoin Cash Experiment post.
Recently there has been a lot going on with Bitcoin Cash regarding what will happen with the scheduled upgrade in November. The main dispute is whether the ABC development team, the majority implementation, should add a new rule to take a portion of the miner reward for themselves.
Three years after Bitcoin Cash (BCH) split from Bitcoin (BTC) it is averaging about 15,000 transactions per day. Visa by comparison processes 1,700 transactions per second, or 150 million transactions per day. Though even the most active blockchains are processing less than 1% of Visa transactions.
By these metrics all blockchains are still experimental. The results of these experiments has yet to be determined.
Implementing the IFP would essentially be declaring the current non-IFP version of BCH a failure. I think that is too soon to call. If people feel a new experiment should be tried, then I hope the current non-IFP experiment will continue as well, even if it is a minority chain with a different ticker.
I am excited for the potential of a chain free of ABC. In my opinion they have stifled Bitcoin Cash development. While neglecting actual scaling, the few things ABC has wasted their time on has been harmful to Bitcoin Cash.
Since splitting in 2018 they have only made two real changes.
1. LTOR, a restricting rule which is part of a dead-end strategy that removes chronological order of transactions within a block, making apps like Memo less useful for recording historical data, especially when over an hour can go by between blocks.
2. Snore signatures, an unnecessary waste of time with negligible value add.
If ABC had done nothing Bitcoin Cash would be better off. I hope the experiment continues without them and we start to see some real scaling.