Dr. Craig Wright: We’re bringing Bitcoin BCH back to fungible cash

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The next upgrades in the pipeline for Bitcoin Cash (BCH) will finally pave the way for people to start treating the cryptocurrency as what it is supposed to be—cash. And a fungible one at that.

That’s the declaration made by Dr. Craig Wright, chief scientist at blockchain research and development firm nChain Group, during a recent talk as part of the “We are Fascinating Project” series in London.

“We’re collaborating with a lot of groups at the moment. We’ve just announced the Electrum Cash project which is going to sort of increase private transactions fungibility and much more within Bitcoin (BCH), so what that will actually allow is people to start treating it as cash,” Wright said. “We’re going to make it back to fungible cash.”

Currently, Bitcoin Cash development groups like Bitcoin ABC are gearing up for a series of protocol upgrades happening every six months starting May 2018, which will see the developers re-enabling a whole host of opcodes in the scripting language, among other things. Restoring the opcodes is important for the network because they will enable Bitcoin Cash to become more than just a currency.

“We’re going to re-enable all those things people used to get excited about Bitcoin for: tokenization, the ability to make either divisible or non-divisible shares at your choice, bonds, futures, derivatives, things that actually make smart contracts that tied to [investment] vehicles, things that allow you to trade over time,” Wright said.

Essentially, the opcodes will allow Bitcoin Cash to have more complicated functionality so that it can also power smart contracts along with other functionalities that will drive up the cryptocurrency’s usage.

“We’re going to re-enable a whole lot of opcodes. We’ve got people in my team at the moment working on that. They’ve already started uploading on Github and other such things,” the nChain chief scientist said.

Not the be-all and end-all of Bitcoin Cash

nChain may be at the forefront of the push for a Bitcoin Cash world, but CEO Jimmy Nguyen is quick to point out that the group is all about collaborating with groups, people, and companies around the world to ensure that their goal of making a Bitcoin Cash-enabled global ecosystem will be a success.

In fact, nChain has already formed partnerships with several organizations and invested in ventures offering products and applications that made Bitcoin Cash more usable, easily as electronic cash on a global basis. The group’s first two investments, made via its investment arm nChain Reaction, were social network Yours.org and South African wallet provider Centbee.

“We at nChain group do not intend, have no desire to be the be all and end all of Bitcoin Cash,” Nguyen said.”We recognize that for it to be successful, we’ll take the collaboration and efforts of groups, companies, people all around the world. And what we’re doing is using our resources and innovation to try and spur and help other people to create and develop the things that’ll be necessary. We’ll be creating some of the things ourselves but our mission really is to enable a spark that goes on across the world so that there’s a thriving community of groups that are contributing to Bitcoin Cash’s success.”

Watch Dr. Craig Wright and Jimmy Nguyen talk about “A Bitcoin Cash World” here: