Bitcoin's transaction fees tend to hover around $5, occasionally soaring to $50, making casual transactions infeasible, much less using CoinJoin. This is stated by the current architects to be by design, and will not change, no matter what. Since Bitcoin's capacity is intentionally limited, the rational behavior for most people is to never move their coins off an exchange, keeping them in custody of a third party until used, defeating any hope for privacy.
An alternative is needed. A payment network with sufficient capacity to handle current and future demand and allow CoinJoin-like transactions. A variant of Bitcoin, strictly adhering to the principles that made Bitcoin popular to begin with.
Such a network exists. It is Bitcoin Cash.
Stemming from disagreement with the incumbent architects on whether or not Bitcoin should be allowed to scale to worldwide capacity, Bitcoin Cash was split to preserve the spirit of peer-to-peer electronic cash. It adheres to the basic principles of Bitcoin, as described in the whitepaper, while research is performed to allow scaling sufficient to satisfy VISA-level throughput and beyond. But even without this, the network is capable of satisfying demand equal to PayPal and several credit card companies without any strain, and without any increase in transaction fees. And, it can do it with off-the-shelf components.
Work was done on the privacy front as well. With the CashFusion protocol, coins can be mixed trustlessly, for the cost of less than $0.01. In fact, it works so well, that to this date, 94% of all Bitcoin Cash are a descendant of a CashFusion transaction.
Bitcoin Cash is widely accepted worldwide, with just one data source listing more than 11k brick-and-mortar merchants. The number of online-only stores accepting it is likely in the 100k.
map.bitcoin.com
In addition, it is in the process of becoming legal tender in the island nation of Sint Maarten in a grassroots, from-the-ground-up fashion.
Bitcoin Cash can be acquired from almost any exchange. If it supports at least three currencies, most chances are Bitcoin Cash is among them.
Bitcoin Cash is programmable and can run a wide range of smart contracts. The most prominent among them are:
For those who prefer an Ethereum-like VM, SmartBCH exists.
More resources on Awesome Bitcoin Cash
Discussion forum: r/btc
Happy to answer your questions.
