Bitcoin is CASH, says BSV developer Joshua Henslee

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BSV developer Joshua Henslee has been pumping out high-quality content recently. In this video, he talks about how Bitcoin is and always was supposed to be cash.

Bitcoin should be used, and it was before the HODL meme took over

Henslee notes that the consensus in the digital currency space today is “hold it and hope it goes up.” However, Bitcoin was never meant to be this way; it was designed as a peer-to-peer electronic cash system. In other words, it’s supposed to be used for exchanging value.

Henslee remembers that Bitcoin didn’t have a price in the beginning—it was purely a way to transfer value online. He remembers the takeover of the digital gold/store-of-value narrative and says anyone who believes this narrative isn’t using their brain. For Henslee, a true store of value can’t drop 30% virtually overnight the way BTC did. Gold remains the best store of value because it is more stable and has a long history spanning back thousands of years.

The recent UST/LUNA crash has caused Henslee to once again reflect on Bitcoin as an electronic cash system. If a top 10 digital currency can implode in such a spectacular fashion, then any of them could. However, if businesses and people were using it for value exchange, it wouldn’t be possible for such a dramatic collapse to occur. For example, if Haste Arcade and large numbers of other such apps were on LUNA, he doesn’t believe it would have collapsed the way it did.

So, how did we arrive at a situation where people simply hold digital currencies to speculate? Henslee says it was around 2016 when the BTC camp abandoned any serious attempts at scaling and settled for attempting to pump their coins.

Solana and other blockchains that can allegedly scale

Henslee admits that he doesn’t spend much time analyzing or thinking about other blockchains. While many tout Solana as the next big thing, he puts this down to most people in the digital currency space “living in la la land.” He notes how Solana has imploded multiple times and how it’s unacceptable for a system to go down for hours, let alone longer, in the real world. If the world’s payments systems ran on Solana and it went down for 7+ hours as it did recently, Henslee reckons there would be a class-action lawsuit by merchants and others impacted by it.

“It’s unacceptable. Bitcoin has never gone down,” Henslee says.

While on the topic of other blockchains and their proponents, Henslee aims at Sam Bankman-Fried for his recent false comments in the Financial Times. He says that what ‘SBF’ said is true of BTC, but it’s not true of Bitcoin (BSV). He questions how it’s possible for one of the leading figures in the industry to say this with a straight face. Sadly, he doesn’t chalk it up to ignorance; he sees a more sinister, dishonest motive at play.

The horrible inefficiency of the current payments system and the need for Bitcoin

In his previous life as a technician in the credit card industry, Henslee gained an inside view into how bad the existing payments infrastructure is. He describes it as outdated and says that people would be surprised by how horrible it really is.

What about those who say innovative companies like Stripe have fixed things and rendered internet money obsolete? “No way,” Henslee says, “we still need internet money.” He challenges anyone to attempt to send a penny on any of these applications and see how far they get.

Henslee notes that, right now, we’re in a ‘chicken and egg’ situation where Bitcoin needs to be used to gain value in order to attract interest and be used. However, he notes that the desire for hard money is there and is seen clearly in people’s desire for gold and silver, and in time, he believes that Bitcoin will be more desirable than both. Why so? With its superior scaling, extremely low fees, and a hard cap on supply, it is simply a superior form of money.

“We have something that’s special, that does something nothing else can do, and that really achieves the dream of Bitcoin pre-2015 before all the nonsense about scaling started,” he says, wrapping up the video.

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